How many audits does one organisation need?

In what is perhaps a masterpiece of (unintended) irony, the LSC has put out a news item on its website saying that it is a key goal to “reduce the amount of auditing for providers” because “in an ideal world we wouldn’t want to audit at all”. It then announces a new guidance page on its website (the link is to the civil one, though the criminal one is identical), which contains a list of the current audit types. Sixteen of them – and “this list is not meant to be exhaustive”.

The guidance lists the types of audits, including what would trigger them, how they are conducted and what are the potential outcomes. Practitioners should study the list, especially if notified by the LSC that they will be subject to one of them. Particularly useful is the “provider dashboard”, which ranks the various contractual key performance indicators according to priority. Breach of those marked as high priority is more likely to trigger an audit than those marked as low priority.

Organisations should be continually monitoring their performance against the KPIs (see chapter 17 of the Handbook) and the dashboard is useful in identifying the ones on which there should be a particular focus.