Recommendation 5

The Treasury has aspirations to standardise financial reporting across government but has not set out how this will make the WGA more useful or accessible. The Treasury faces difficulties when trying to categorise transactions and balances reported by over 9,000 organisations into robust categories that are useful to the user. The Government Finance Function within the Treasury is undertaking work to align finance processes across government such as expense claims. It is also planning to standardise how Departments categorise their balances and transactions, which should reduce the significant manual work required to produce the WGA. We welcome all efforts to enhance the quality of information provided in the WGA and support the Treasury’s work to achieve this aim. We previously recommended Whole of Government Accounts 2018–19 7 that financial reporting within the WGA could be improved by providing more detailed disclosures, in addition to that required by financial reporting standards. We expect the work of the Government Finance Function could result in the WGA including more useful information for users, such as much more detailed analysis of how taxpayers’ money is spent on the purchase of goods and services, the costs across government of EU Exit and the cost of COVID-19. The Treasury’s plans to publish underlying data alongside the WGA is an innovative solution that could further improve transparency and accessibility. Recommendation: The Treasury should report against the progress of the work carried out by the Government Finance Function in the WGA given how key it is to improving both the production of the WGA and the insights it can provide. It should ensure its programme includes and accelerates plans to implement tools and processes to improve the information it gathers on cross-government issues such as EU Exit and COVID-19.