Recommendation 9

We therefore asked the Treasury why publication of the 2020–21 WGA was so delayed. The Treasury told us that it had assumed that collecting the data needed for the WGA would take two to three months, that preparing the accounts would take five to six months, and that the C&AG’s audit would take three to four months. It explained that the process was prolonged by delays to the accounts that feed into the WGA and delays to receiving the data needed for the WGA, which resulted in it having to extend the data collection window. Under the system in use at the time, the data collection phase must end before the accounts preparation phase could begin. HM Treasury extended this deadline three times until December 2022. The Treasury recognised that it had taken longer to produce the 2020–21 WGA after the end of the financial year that it related to compared to previous WGAs. But it asserted that given the delays to being able to start preparing the account, this was “probably one of the fastest production timetables that we have ever followed” and that, at 14 months from start to completion, this was the fastest that it had ever produced.11