Auditors unable to sign off accounts partly due to lack of IT controls amid challenging ERP deployment
Birmingham City Council turned off security features on its Oracle ERP system, meaning auditors have been unable to sign off the accounts for Europe's largest local government body, which effectively went bankrupt earlier this year.reported that the £3.
"When we look at any audit, we try and determine whether the IT control environment is appropriate and whether we can actually see what's happened within what we call 'the black box'. For Birmingham, we can't do that. We have no insight into what's happened within the core IT security systems because there's no record," Stocks said.
Stocks said the council could not give an"out-turn" position – an accounting measure of work or sales – or produce a set of accounts for the most recent financial year."All of that arises from the Oracle implementation that we all know didn't work," he said.In July 2019, the council picked Oracle Fusion Cloud to replace SAP for financial, HR and procurement processes. In March 2022,the implementation cost would rise from £20 million to £38.7 million.
Despite concerns that the system would meet the council's needs and replace the functionality in SAP, the councilStocks said that since the council started using the Oracle system, one of the main problems has been cash management. The previous SAP system took information from the bank and then allocated the cache to the relevant ledger codes.
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