Adrian Crompton, Auditor General for Wales

We are pleased to present our Annual Report and Accounts for 2025-26

Alongside our financial and accountability statements, this Report provides a summary of progress made on delivering the audit work programmes set out in our Annual Plan for 2025-26.

During the reporting period, we delivered a comprehensive and impactful programme of audit work. I am pleased to present a selection of case studies to
provide a taste of our work this year and the impact it has made.

Nearly all of our accounts audit opinions were delivered by the statutory or agreed deadline, where audited bodies delivered good quality draft accounts
and responded in a timely manner to audit queries. 

However, only half of all local government bodies met the statutory deadline for preparing their 2024-25 accounts; a deterioration from the previous year and the year before that. Consequently, I recently wrote to all bodies warning that growing delays in the preparation of statutory accounts pose a real risk to financial transparency and good governance across the sector. We will continue to work closely with local government bodies, professional networks and the Welsh Government in 2026-27 to support improvement, share good practice and help rebuild a timely accounts process.

Alongside our accounts work, we delivered 16 national report outputs from our programme of studies, which played a key role in supporting the work of the Senedd committees. And we made significant progress towards eliminating the post pandemic backlog in local performance audit delivery, while continuing to shape our work to address the evolving challenges faced by audited bodies.

In 2025-26, we were particularly proud to achieve the strongest set of audit quality scores in our ten years of working with the Quality Assurance Department of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. 

We also took significant steps over the last year to improve how Audit Wales reports are written. We developed and introduced more robust writing standards to strengthen the clarity, accessibility and impact of our outputs. Towards the end of the year, we launched a complementary new section of our website, called Insights, through which we explain key audit findings in plain language, provide data visualisations and offer toolkits and guides to support better
decision making. 

In early 2026, we commissioned an external contractor to run an independent survey of our key stakeholders to gather their views on the value and impact of our audit work. The exercise covered key roles including Chief Executives, Council Leaders, Board Chairs, Directors of Finance, Chairs of Audit Committees and the main performance audit contacts at all principal audited bodies. We were grateful to receive constructive, informative and predominantly positive feedback from 112 individuals across 65 different audited bodies, with good representation across all sectors.

This year also saw a big increase in new correspondence and external whistleblowing cases compared to 2024-25. These are routes through which potential concerns about the use of public money can be raised with us by members of the public and others to inform our audit work. This increase appears to correlate with the results of a recent Wales Omnibus survey, which showed awareness and understanding of Audit Wales among the general public appears to be increasing.

This Annual Report is the last of my tenure as Auditor General. It has been a great privilege since 2018 to serve as the Auditor General for Wales. Through a series of podcasts and a recent letter to the Senedd, I have provided my end of-term perspective on the persistent challenges and opportunities for improving public services. 

Undertaking the role of Auditor General would be impossible without the help and support of many people. The Welsh public sector is blessed with many
marvellous public servants with whom it has been my privilege to work. To the Wales Audit Office Board, under the leadership of Dr Ian Rees, I am enormously grateful for their challenge, advice and support over the last eight years. And above all, I would like to thank the staff of Audit Wales. Any Auditor General, and certainly this one, is reliant on their professionalism, dedication and good humour. I am in their debt.

I wish Catherine Mealing-Jones well in her role as the next Auditor General. I am sure that, under her leadership and with the continuing support of the Board, Audit Wales will continue to go from strength to strength.