Unprecedented pressures being faced by Stirling Council’s finance team have been blamed for councillors being unable to scrutinise the authority’s accounts.
The council’s finance, economy and corporate support committee was told last week that the usual papers showing the resource and capital outturns were unavailable.
Chair Councillor Margaret Brisley, the council’s longest standing councillor, said she had been made aware that “due to pressure of business” the finance team had asked for the reports to be deferred until the next meeting and she had “reluctantly” agreed.
She said: “This is a most unusual situation. It has never happened before or during my time as a councillor.
“I accepted the accentuating circumstances and the pressure the finance team were under so hopefully members will understand and accept that this was the situation. I’m certainly reassured that the day to day scrutiny of finance has been ongoing and having had a quick review of the situation so far I’m satisfied that there’s nothing to concern me unduly in the figures I have seen.
“Hopefully members of the committee will appreciate the fact of the struggles the officers are having at the moment.”
Conservative group leader Councillor Neil Benny, however, said the importance of the committee’s public scrutiny role over the accounts could not be understated and described it as “core business”.
Corporate accounting manager George Murphy told members there had been additional pressure on the finance team over the past couple of months, mainly from supporting the implementation of the new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution, which is replacing the council’s core finance, procurement, HR, payroll and CRM systems as well as a number of minor system or manual processes.
“That has basically meant that the vast majority of the finance team have been moved across to support that area of work,” he added. “That has left a smaller core team to manage the business as usual activities which includes our normal budget monitoring work.
“In saying that, we have been carrying on our normal budget monitoring, it’s just been at a much lower level than what we would normally do.
“We have also had to manage some long-term sickness absence within the team, some key people.”
Mr Murphy said there were plans to bring in additional resource to support both ERP and other work within the next few months.
“There is nothing of a material or significant nature that would cause us to be concerned with anything to do with either the revenue or capital outturn positions at this stage. We are now working through our final entries to get to a final outturn position which we will bring back to committee in early June.
“I can only apologise to the committee. It’s unprecedented what we have had to deal with over the last few months in the finance team. I would certainly assure you it will not happen again.”
Councillor Benny said, however: “I completely understand and sympathise but the processes and structures we have in this council and local government more generally mean I’m not supposed to just take your word for it, I’m supposed to see it.
“Completely understand where you are coming from and I have known you long enough and we have enough of a relationship that I can trust that - but it’s that thing where I’m not supposed to do that and take your word for it.
“This is not a disrespectful thing. We all know that’s how these things are supposed to work.”
SNP councillor Gerry McLaughlan thanked Mr Murphy for the explanation.
However, he added: “In an age where my party is being criticised for not scrutinising accounts - I was getting that in first - with all the trust in the world we want to see the figures.”
Members agreed with a suggestion by Councillor Brisley that a special meeting of the committee could be called as soon as reports were likely to be ready within the next few weeks.
