Corporate report

Government Internal Audit Agency Corporate Plan 2020-23

Published 10 July 2019

Foreword

Chief Executive

Joining in October 2018, I found our people utterly committed to the value brought by high‑quality internal audit and counter fraud services, with our customers supportive and wanting more. I take my hat off to my predecessor who laid the foundations for success – focusing on growing us to a critical mass within government and establishing the infrastructure necessary to become a unified agency.

Both our customers and our people are now eager for the next phase of our development. Our customers want ever better insights in support of government outcomes, which means focusing on our impact and our quality. Our people want clearer direction, more opportunities to work across our customer base, and stronger leadership and engagement. And we need to embrace innovation, evolving the way we work and the tools we use, as organisations themselves change in our post-digital era

In response we have developed a new and ambitious vision for where we want to be in 2023, with a strategy for how to get there. The plan we present here is the “what and when” of that. It focuses on the changes we need to make. Alongside this, critically, we will be delivering our core work of internal audit engagements and counter fraud services. To give us the change leadership we need as we develop our services while they are in flight, we are establishing a transformation programme with a senior sponsor for each area of our vision – customer impact, our people, quality, innovation and our own firm foundations. We now need to get on with it! Exciting times ahead.

Board Chair

This is a pivotal time for the Agency. When we set about creating GIAA four years ago, our customers supported us and our ambitions. Now is the time to repay that support by delivering more and more of the benefits we bring as one agency Late last year, I was proud to be appointed Non-Executive Chair of the GIAA Board and since taking on that role, I have felt a growing sense of momentum from our teams who want to keep building on our achievements. We have also welcomed Elizabeth who joined us as our new CEO, bringing a different style of leadership and a fresh approach ideally suited to the challenge of taking GIAA to the next level. We’re working hard to improve inclusion and engagement. Leadership is evolving around here, in a good way.

We developed our new vision, strategy and three-year plan through widespread engagement with our people from all corners of the Agency. Moving away from the more traditional approach of ‘tell and sell’, we are building a culture of inclusion.

We need our people to commit to this plan, understand it and own it. Our plan is our guide for how we will work, serve our customers and build our people’s career paths. As a board, there is very little we can achieve without the full engagement of our people. We value their expertise in knowing our customers and understanding their biggest challenges. Everyone in GIAA will play a crucial role in delivering impact through insight across government.

I want to thank our customers for their patience. This has been a year of planning and major change in GIAA as we have taken some time to reflect and plan for the sort of organisation we want to be in future. As we emerge from this period of self-assessment, we are now keen to crack on and deliver on our promises. Let us make GIAA a brilliant agency in a Brilliant Civil Service and a great place to work. Let us deliver real impact through insight, and ensure real value for money for UK taxpayers.

Who we are

We are the Government Internal Audit Agency (GIAA), an executive agency of Her Majesty’s Treasury (HM Treasury). We were set up in April 2015 to improve the quality of internal audit provided to central government. In our first few years, we focused on creating a “single audit practice”. We now provide internal audit services to three‑quarters of central government, and we have an award-winning counter fraud and investigation (CF&I) service. Building on this, we are embarking on a new phase to take GIAA to the next level, becoming more than the sum of our parts to provide better insights and achieve better outcomes for government.

Our mission, vision and values

Our mission and vision have been developed with the input of our customers and our people. Through a series of engagements, including customer meetings, workshops and feedback from our teams, we have developed a comprehensive picture of our purpose and where we want to be.

Our vision: We have an ambitious three-year vision for the Agency. By 2023 we want to have made a step-change in the value we add, in the respect that we command, and in the engagement of our people, by a persistent focus on the five areas in this vision:

Our mission: Our people provide objective insight so that central government can achieve better outcomes and value for money for the public – better insights, better outcome.

Our strength is that our professional services are provided by government for government. That gives us unrivalled access, trusted relationships and the ability to share our understanding across government. We share public service values. We are responsive to the external context.

Our values are: Customer focus, respect, professionalism and continuous development, leading to mutual trust. Our values are visible in all our interactions with customers and colleagues, helping us to provide better insights and achieve better outcomes. Our values align with and complement the wider vision for a Brilliant Civil Service.

Our strategy to 2023

Our strategy sets out how we will achieve our vision, with our people at the centre of what we do and our customers at the centre of why we do it.

Demanding on customer impact

• Partnering across government through relationships, knowledge and insights, we will:
  • Articulate our offer to deliver insights
  • Map our customer landscape and set out our growth strategy
  • Provide cross‑government insight
  • Build relationships with partners
  • Focus on actions and outcomes.

Unleashing people’s talent and confidence

• Maintaining a high calibre of people delivering sustainable quality, we will:
  • Develop our workforce strategy further
  • Clarify roles and employment offers
  • Redefine our learning and development for customer impact
  • Value all roles and people, recognising interdependence
  • Move towards fewer locations.

Uncompromising on quality

• Striking a balance of responsiveness and consistency through independence, agility and rigour, we will:
  • Define exactly what we mean by quality and how we measure it at every stage
  • Improve planning and delivery
  • Improve management information.

Ambitious on innovation

• Learning through continuous improvement we will:
  • Encourage incremental innovation
  • Develop our innovation strategy
  • Build centres of excellence across our offer.

Built on firm foundations

• Role modelling for our customer partners, we will:
  • Improve our own governance
  • Increase effectiveness of processes and systems
  • Optimise our operating model.

An overview: 2019 – 2023

2019-20

2019-20 will be one of consolidation and focused action. As well as continuing to deliver a high-quality service to our customers, we will develop a strategy implementation programme that will guide our activity over this three-year period, as we work to deliver our vision. Our strategic action plan for 2019-20 contains actions that will increase clarity for our people, putting us on a firm footing for the next two years, and improve the quality of our service to customers, ensuring they experience better insights and better outcomes.

We will work across our customer base to identify and share good practice and to deliver deeper, more relevant insights, including a piece of cross-government work. Our people will begin to see the shape of their future through the workforce strategy, which will clarify our approach to pay, including how we will deliver common terms and conditions. We will more clearly define what we mean by quality and how we measure it, so that we can track improvements and work together to increase the timeliness and quality of our reports. We will begin our innovation journey, encouraging grassroots innovation and making sure we have the right people in place to lead the development of our long-term innovation strategy.

2020-21

2020-21 will build on the previous year, and many of our programmes will see initiation or continued development. We will further develop and implement our strategy for providing insight across government, being creative in what we look at and how we communicate it. Our workforce strategy will allow us to develop a pipeline of talent through our established apprenticeship scheme and offering interchange opportunities in government. Having more clearly defined what quality means, we will continue to raise professional standards, developing our people through a focused capability and leadership offering. We will begin to implement our long-term innovation strategy, working with partners to leverage their developments and sharing our own. Our people will feel fully part of delivering our vision, and our customers will feel the benefits.

2021-23

2021-23 will see us move closer to delivering our vision in 2023. Our work in the previous two years will allow us to implement in full our cross-government assurance and insight strategy, ensuring our work is targeted at customer needs. We will further raise our people’s skills through development and training, continuing to deliver high-quality assignments and ensuring our customers feel increasing impact year on year. Having worked hard to raise quality and engage in innovation, we will further develop our expertise in all sources of assurance in government. We will also continue to make our internal processes more efficient and effective. We will be considered an organisation that is exceeding expectations. Our people will be proud of the work they do, and the organisation they represent.

Strategic action plan 2019 – 2020

Our strategy represents an ambitious evolution for the Agency, and it will take at least three years to implement it. Our corporate plan, which is refreshed annually, sets out our strategic actions for 2019-20 and outlines those for the following two years. These actions sit alongside our continued commitment to provide quality services to our customers. Underpinning our corporate plan, we will develop a comprehensive strategy implementation programme for the period 2019-23.

Our strategy and plan align with the objectives of our sponsor, HM Treasury, as set out in its Single Departmental Plan. In particular, we contribute to HMT’s objective to place the public finances on a sustainable footing, ensuring value for money and improved outcomes in public services. We also contribute to HMT’s diversity objectives. This year, our plan focuses on actions to progress the following elements of our strategy:

Demanding on customer impact

• Articulate our offer and how it is designed to deliver insights to customers.
• Develop and implement our strategy for providing insight across government.

Unleashing people’s talent and confidence

• Develop further our workforce strategy to match the right people to the right work, taking into account the opportunities to innovate and use technology and automation to deliver our services.
• For both existing people and external recruits, clarify GIAA’s roles and employment offer.
• Cultivate a diverse and inclusive environment that values all people and roles, and recognises interdependence.

Uncompromising on quality

• Define exactly what we mean by quality, and improve how we measure it.
• Improve the planning and delivery of assignments.
• Improve the reliability of internal management information to assist in planning and delivery and to maintain evidence of high-quality assignments.

Ambitious on innovation

• Encourage incremental innovation, recognising that new ideas are not always radical.
• Develop and implement a longer-term innovation strategy.

Built on firm foundations

• Improve our own governance.
• Optimise our operating model to make us sustainable for the long term.

We have prioritised our 2019-20 actions based on feedback from our customers and our people. We have also prioritised actions which address areas for improvement identified in our 2018-19 Governance Statement, and support us in preparing for two major external reviews of the Agency: a Tailored Review due later in 2019 and an External Quality Assessment of our internal audit provision due in 2020.

The next two years

As well as embedding our achievements this year, we anticipate the following strategic actions during 2020-23. Several of these directly build on the strategic actions in 2019-20, and others are independent, acknowledging that the vision takes three years to achieve, and everything cannot be done in the first year.

2020-21:

• Develop and implement a strategy for external communications and customer relationship management.
• Agree ways to improve how we assess our insight, impact and influence.
• Further develop and implement cross government assurance, learning the lessons from our work in 2019-20.
• Take forward the next stages of our established apprenticeship schemes at various levels, developing a pipeline of talent for the future.
• Agree how we will offer more interchange opportunities within government, allowing people to take their experience at GIAA and apply it elsewhere.
• Agree our approach to area networks and how we bring our people together to promote a supportive and inclusive culture, and implement accordingly.
• Further develop our quality assurance framework to drive improvements beyond compliance.
• Implement our longer-term innovation strategy and continue to make GIAA thought leaders in the field of public sector assurance.
• Continue to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our processes and systems, and ensure that it is straight forward to comply with corporate requirements.

2021-23:

• Agree our growth strategy setting out the plan for the Agency’s future, ensuring our sustainability and continuing to be greater than the sum of our parts.
• Agree a plan to broaden our cross government services, including building our relationships with other assurance providers and partners, to help bolster our offering to customers.
• Develop expertise in all sources of assurance in government, advising customers on how to access it, how to use it and how they complement each other.
• Further develop our expertise in risk management.

We will regularly review progress on delivery of this year’s actions, and adjust our three-year strategy implementation programme as needed. We will produce an updated corporate plan next year, setting out the detailed actions for 2020-21.

Key performance indicators

When preparing our corporate plan, we reviewed and rationalised our 2018-19 targets with reference to current levels of performance.

In 2019-20, we will measure our overall performance against the following indicators:

• Deliver a year-end financial position within a 1% surplus and breaking even on our 2019‑20 budget.
• Achieve an average of 70% for overall customer satisfaction with individual pieces of work.
• Aim that 75% of higher importance recommendations we make are actioned on time by customers.
• Deliver 90% of planned audits to at least draft report issued stage by March 2020.
• Increase our people engagement score in the people survey. To support these high-level key performance indicators, we will continue to improve our routine and more detailed performance reporting.