We’re here to Assure, Explain and Inspire.
The Auditor General is the statutory external auditor of most of the Welsh public sector.
Our key strength is our wide range of skills and knowledge that has arisen from our position as the the statutory external auditor
See our current and previous consultations
This section sets out how you may request information from us and provides some direct links to information of wider public interest.
Governance and oversight at Audit Wales
Our accounts are audited by an independent firm appointed by the Welsh Parliament.
Our Executive Leadership Team is responsible for directing the organisation
The Auditor General is responsible for auditing most of the public money spent in Wales.
See our work around the COVID-19 pandemic
Audit Services has a reach of over 800 public bodies across Wales covering financial and performance audit
Our programme of shared learning events focusses on topics that are common across public services
Having a strategic, dynamic and high quality audit programme is a key focus of our strategy
The NFI matches data across organisations and systems to help public bodies identify fraud and overpayments.
We work with others from across the Welsh public sector and beyond
See our latest news, blogs, events and more
Find out the latest news
See our blogs on many different topics
Access our data tools and useful data sources
View our videos on our YouTube channel
Our events bring together individuals from across the Welsh public sector
Access all the resources from our shared learning events
We have installed ReadSpeaker’s webReader, which allows visitors to instantly convert online content to audio on our website.
Click on the icon above to try this out, and take advantage of the full range of useful webReader features by clicking the link below.
Readspeaker website
This accessibility statement applies to www.audit.wales. This website is run by Audit Wales. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website.
View accessibility statement
We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact:
info@audit.wales
The potential scale of public sector fraud and error is eye watering.
We previously estimated that fraud and error cost between £100 million and £1 billion each year to Welsh public services.
Audit Wales’s work in this field includes facilitating the National Fraud Initiative (the NFI) in Wales, part of a UK-wide data sharing and matching exercise. Each year, the work identifies millions of pounds of avoidable fraud and loss.
And we’re keen to do more, to explore new areas of ‘fraud analytics’ work, to use data at scale to highlight potential fraud, error and possible savings.
Where do you start looking?
Looking for fraud can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Fraud analytics will hopefully provide us with a magnet.
Working with NHS Counter Fraud Service Wales and other stakeholders, we have been learning from past fraud cases in community pharmacy to carry out a data matching pilot project.
We explored millions of rows of data, looking mostly for outliers where medicines were particularly expensive.
Our work was deliberately limited in focus, and while we didn’t find any specific examples of fraud, we were able to flag potential dispensing cost savings of around £700,000.
You can read more in the letter we published on our website.
We learnt valuable lessons from the project, such as the benefit of bringing together expertise across organisations to review fraud risks. And we learnt that data governance is time-consuming to navigate.
The NHS in Wales can learn lessons from our work too. We’ve challenged the NHS to do more thinking on how to manage risks around fraud and error in community pharmacy. And we are pleased that it is building on our work to create its own data tool and adapt its approaches to reviewing community pharmacy dispensing data.
Our next steps are to take stock and decide where to go next. We’re already working with NHS stakeholders to progress another pilot exercise on issues relating to patient registrations with general practitioners. Watch this space.
Dave Winstone is a Data Analyst at Audit Wales, working on a range of data analytic projects including the Community Pharmacy Data Matching Pilot, and has worked in Audit Wales since 2020. He is interested in how data can be used to improve processes and has experience in the public sector before joining Audit Wales.