05:00PM, Friday 13 March 2026
Slough Borough Council has been ‘playing catch up’ with its accounts since the 2018/2019 financial year, an auditor has said.
Councils are responsible for publishing their accounts to show how much has been spent during each financial year.
These records are then looked into by an external auditor who gives their overall opinion.
But in 2021, the cash-strapped Slough Borough Council required intervention from the Government to deal with its financial situation, and since then, the local authority has been working on its transformation plan.
It was not until 2023 that Slough’s external auditor, Grant Thornton, issued a ‘disclaimer of opinion’ for the local authority’s long awaited 2018/19 accounts.
This meant that the auditors didn’t have enough evidence to say if the accounts were right or wrong.
At an audit and corporate governance committee meeting on Wednesday (March 11), Julie Masci, the council’s lead external auditor, said that was the financial year that created ‘very significant challenges’ for the council.
Ms Masci said: “The council has been playing catch up since that very difficult initial year of [external] audit in 2018/19.”
The Government has since then imposed a deadline asking councils to publish any outstanding sets of accounts that have not been audited.
To meet this deadline, over the past two financial years, six years of account records from 2019/20 to 2024/25 were finalised.
But a ‘disclaimer of opinion’ was issued for all of these.
The 2024/25 set of accounts was signed off in February, but at this week’s meeting, Ms Masci presented the four-week audit work that went into the financial records.
Ms Masci said: “Some things have moved forward positively, but there are some areas where I think there is work for the council to undertake, not least particularly in relation to cash balances.”
She added that she ‘suspects’ there will be a decision made at some point where Slough Council will have to write off its residual balances.
Nick Penny, the council’s director of finance, corporate and commercial, said being able to focus on one set of accounts for the right financial year is a ‘real positive step in the right direction’.
He added that ‘robust planning’ is needed to make sure the 2025/26 accounts are published by the June 30 deadline.
This will then allow Grant Thornton to carry out a detailed full audit – the first in a long time, since the 2018/19 sets of accounts.
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