Large number of recommendations for States of Jersey overdue

The financial regulator for the States of Jersey says the implementation of a large number of agreed recommendations are "significantly overdue".

The Comptroller and Auditor General suggests improvements for the running of the States, independently audited bodies and aided independent bodies.

These include corporate governance or value for money arrangements and are agreed with the government or body.

The States of Jersey acknowledged "there is more work still to do".

The Comptroller and Auditor General report, published on Wednesday, said the States of Jersey was "ahead of many other jurisdictions" in implementing arrangements for tracking changes, and progress had been made.

However, it found that while a tracker system had improved scrutiny of the status of recommendations, the number of them still to be implemented remained roughly the same during 2021.

The report said until recommendations were implemented "weaknesses in governance, internal control and in the delivery of value for money" remained.

At the time of review on 27 October, there were 259 recommendations in the tracker.

Of these 21 had been implemented, 164 were not yet due for implementation, and the remainder were either overdue or at risk of becoming overdue.

Comptroller and Auditor General, Lynn Pamment, said: "Good progress has been made in identifying the recommendations that have not yet been implemented and the reasons why.

"There remains however a large number of agreed recommendations that have not been implemented, many of which are significantly overdue.

"There needs to be a continued focus on timely implementation with the aim of reducing the number of open and overdue recommendations."

Open recommendations are those yet to be implemented.

A government spokesperson said while open recommendations had fallen since the establishment of the tracker in 2019 and improvements continued to be made, "we acknowledge that we are on a journey and there is more work still to do".

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