Recommendation 7

HM Treasury told us that it is tracking and controlling public expenditure on COVID-19 in the same way that it does routinely for all public expenditure, through regular monthly reporting of departments’ spending, which it described as a robust mechanism for tracking spend. It puts more focus and effort on tracking particular items of COVID-19 spending because they are large and, in many cases, novel.7 It has used the cost tracker to corroborate departments’ spend-to-date data, and to reconcile and challenge consistency of data across departments. Through the cost tracker, HM Treasury has picked up issues with categorisation of cost data, with the way in which departments are recording data, and with the completeness of information. It plans to use the cost tracker as a source of key information for the Whole of Government Accounts.8