Recommendation 6

The NAO reported that Treasury places primary reliance on individual department’s accounting officers to monitor their fees and charges. Accounting officers are responsible for maintaining effective governance and internal controls, including ensuring that fees are set appropriately and disclosed in-line with Treasury guidance.7 The Treasury highlighted that one of the challenges with this approach is that everyone is doing things in silos resulting in inconsistency across government.8 We asked the Treasury what it is looking to do to help strengthen the arrangements to improve oversight of fee setting.9 The Treasury told us it intends to do more to help accounting officers by regularly assessing and looking at the system, as well as help departments navigate it using best practice.10