Local Authority Accounting Panel

Welcome

This Local Authority Accounting Panel focuses on local government accounting and financial reporting issues and produces guidance for practitioners.

To provide timely advice on current developments it issues:

The panel also oversees the annual Local Authority Accounting Conference.

Contact us

Address your queries and feedback to Milan Palmer, Policy Support Officer. If you would like to be considered for panel membership, please send a summary of your CV and a note of your key areas of interest.

News articles

Council tax ‘starting to look like poll tax’
17 May 2019
Post-Brexit regional funding: ‘We’ve not been sitting on our hands’
17 May 2019
Northamptonshire councils to be merged
15 May 2019

See all articles

What's going on?

CIPFA briefing on leases

To support the formal CIPFA and Local Authority (Scotland) Accounts Advisory Committee (LASAAC) Consultation on the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS) 16, CIPFA has issued a Local Authority Leases Briefing 1 (PDF, 227KB).

CIPFA codes

CIPFA's codes of practice and related guidance help local authorities in the UK to maintain the highest possible standards in financial reporting consistent with IFRS.

Streamlining the Accounts: Guidance for Local Authorities

CIPFA has worked with the Society of London Treasurers, the Society of District Council Treasurers, and Grant Thornton LLP to offer guidance to local authorities and some additional support steps to streamline both the format of their published financial statements and the year-end processes that underpin them.

This publication is based on information provided by local authorities already taking positive action and who have found that clearer and shorter financial statements can be prepared to a high standard that is code compliant but with less time and reduced resources.

These local authorities have also, in some cases, managed to prepare financial statements earlier and have found that streamlining can deliver wider benefits to the finance function in terms of:

• more accurate in-year financial information

• smoother external audit process

• finance staff freed up for other work

• skills training and development

• enhanced reputation of the finance team.

Streamlining the Accounts: Guidance for Local Authorities (PDF, 3MB) is being made available as a pre-publication draft to enable practitioners to benefit from the content at as early a stage as possible.