[wdmmg-discuss] Things I found out about the WGA

Wed Jul 7 11:25:36 UTC 2010

These are my notes from my meeting with the team at Communities and Local 
Government (CLG) on Friday.

The Whole of Government Accounts (WGA) is run by 2 people in CLG and 5 or 
6 people in the Treasury. So not a big operation in terms of people, but 
huge in terms of scope of UK finanaces.

The WGA exercise is just that all local bodies fill out an L-pack and all 
central government bodies fill out a C-pack.
The packs, with no results in, are publically avaiable on the websites of 
CLG and the Treasury.

The aim of the presentation to give an overview of all WGA.

Previous to WGA there was a "cash system" that just showed money in and 
money out for each department. Then the intention, in 1998, for wga is to 
add into the picture assets and accurals.

The goverment has been required by law to conduct WGA but has not been 
required to publish it. This year it is required to (need to check this 
FRS17 liability).

WGA is a very rich set of data to base political decisions on, compared to 
what they currently use which is RO form <http://tinyurl.com/35rzoye>, 
used by the ONS, which is based on ESA rules for EU and it not very 
detailed at all.

Even though more rich the wga won't cover share holding in banks and rail 
track.

All the bodies required to complete wga are listed on sheet 23 of the counter 
party id list.

The council accountants have been filling out this report since 2001/2002. 
They would really like to see some results. The time line in the notes she 
gave out shows that audited accounts are submitted in 1st July. Then the 
results are audited by end of October. Auditing, I believe, means matching 
up buyers and providers:

A perfect match is:
Barnet:
purchases £5.5 m from Enfield
Enfield:
sales £5.5 m to Barnet.
COINS would eliminate this to zero as perfect match.

A nother example:
Barnet:
Purchases £5.0 m from Enfield
Enfield:
sales £5.5 m to Barnet
COINS would eliminate 5.0m and and put 0.5M into suspense.
The the suspense needs to be investigated more to see where the mistake is.

You can set a tolernce in coins so the extent of the difference it cares about. 
It was set to 5.0m for 2008/09 accounts. I will be set to 1.0m for 2009/10 
accouts.

See counter party guidance at wga clg page 92.

In the Treasury's accounts the Housing revenue accounts subsidy is money going 
straight back to Treasury.

The L-pack 
<http://www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/localgovernmentfinance/governmentaccounts/wga200910/> 
comes in a few different varieties, one security locked for sending to 
auditors, one for checking the books balance.

The pack breaks down spending into categories like types of assets, like 
buildings, spending on road repair and building (there is a special section for 
this as civil engineers want to know) spending on different types of services 
and investments see L-pack for more details.

questions and thoughts for afterwards
   - we need think about showing assets and accurals (and also contracts
     and suppliers).
   - need to make foi of 2008/09 report minus MoD and Dept Health (as these
     failed audit).
  - how can we aid the wga team with our visualisations? Would it help to
    have more visuals in
  - find out what a sub consolidiation is as there are different levels for
    different bodies on page two slides.
   - find out what RA and SA report is.
   - find out more about the clear line of sight project is, for aligning
     different accounting systems with CIPFA to make RSA reports local
     authority accounts not understood by most government accountants.
  - find out about differnt accounting systems e.g. european system of accounts.