Recommendation 33

We asked the Department and NHS England why so many NHS commissioners and NHS providers missed the deadline for completing their financial audits, and what it was doing to ensure that this improved. NHS England recognised that the number of organisations who were meeting the June deadline was lower than before the COVID–19 pandemic, but told us that this was improving. It told us that one of the reasons for the delays was “definitely the overall pressure on the local audit market” and the trade–off audit firms were making between undertaking local authority accounts and NHS accounts. It told us that “there are no systemic problems” with NHS bodies that were contributing to delays, and that it expected to see continual improvement.56