When the external auditor's query lands: responding without the back-and-forth

For most parish and town councils in England, the AGAR goes to the external auditor appointed for their area under the Smaller Authorities' Audit Appointments arrangements — and for the majority of councils that means PKF Littlejohn. The limited assurance review is done on paper, at distance, by a reviewer working from exactly two things: the return, and whatever the council sent with it.

That framing explains almost every query. The reviewer has no ledger, no local knowledge and no ability to pop in and ask. If something on the return does not reconcile, or an explanation does not actually explain, the only tool they have is a written query — and the clock on the council's response is usually short, with the review fee rising if the file has to be reopened repeatedly.

The structure that closes queries

Every effective query response has the same three parts:

• Cause — what actually happened, in one plain sentence. "The council received an £18,900 CIL payment in September which has no prior-year equivalent."
• Amount — figures that add up to the number being queried, or close enough that the remainder is obviously trivial.
• Evidence — the supporting document attached, not described. The minute, the bank statement, the grant offer letter, the invoice.

The third part is the one councils skip, and it is the one that matters most. A reviewer can close a query the day the evidence arrives. A reviewer who is told "the minute confirms this" has to write back and ask for the minute — another round, more delay, and potentially more cost to the council.

What doesn't work

Arguing with the premise. Responding that the variance "was already explained" or that the question seems unnecessary extends the correspondence and changes nothing. If the original explanation had done the job, the query would not exist. Answer the question that was asked.

Narrative without numbers. A paragraph about a busy year for the council, however accurate, cannot be reconciled to anything. Every sentence in a good response either states a figure or points at a document.

Answering a different question. If the query is about the difference between Box 7 and Box 8, an explanation of why expenditure rose is a wasted round. Read the query twice; answer it once.

The queries that come up every year

A handful of themes account for most correspondence: variance explanations that describe what moved rather than why (covered in detail in our AGAR variance guide); Box 7 not agreeing to Box 8 with no stated reconciliation of debtors and creditors; Box 9 moving without a matching asset register; the dates for the exercise of public rights being defective — wrong length, wrong period, or not evidenced; missing signatures or the governance statement answered inconsistently with the accounts; and trust fund questions answered in a way that contradicts the council's own records. Most of these are checkable in ten minutes before submission, which is the cheapest audit fee reduction available.

If the deadline is a problem

If the information genuinely cannot be assembled in the window given — a signatory is away, the bank is slow producing a statement — say so before the deadline rather than after it, state what is outstanding and when it will arrive, and send everything else on time. A partial response on time with a dated commitment reads entirely differently from silence.

After it closes

When the completion certificate arrives, put five minutes into prevention: note what was queried, and write next year's explanation for that box at the point the transaction happens rather than the week before submission. Councils that get queried two years running are almost always answering the same question twice.

Procedures and deadlines are set out in the instructions issued with each year's AGAR pack — always follow the current year's instructions from your appointed auditor, as arrangements are updated annually.