Trainee auditor's blogs

Work, study and moving house

10 December 2009

It’s been a busy time of it over the last few months – juggling work and study whilst trying to move house is not the most fun I’ve ever had but it’s certainly been a challenge to keep everything up in the air.

It all finished within about a two week period as well. First I moved house, which was a long weekend of hard work then back to work on the Monday to get stuck into finishing off this year’s housing benefit certification.

The housing benefit certification is a big piece of work that kicks off whilst final accounts are still going on, however the bulk of the work tends to be done after final accounts have ended (i.e. beginning of October). Each Council has to submit a form to DWP to say how much Housing Benefit & Council Tax Benefit they’ve awarded during the year so they can reclaim this from DWP and we do a check of the figures within the form to ensure they’re correct. This includes checking a number of individual cases to ensure that benefit was correctly awarded in line with DWP requirements – it’s a big project each year which can end up taking six weeks or more, depending on how things go.

Once the housing benefit certification I was working on was signed off it was time to go on study leave for my second set of exams – this time it was Financial Reporting (FR) and Financial Management, Systems & Techniques (FMST).

I made the mistake of concentrating on FMST – my weaker subject – and when I came to look at FR in preparation for the exam started thinking that I didn’t remember any of it! A nice half hour of panic later it was a case of settling down and doing questions to remind myself it was all still in my head somewhere.

Now exams, housing benefits and moving are over I’m back at work starting systems work at the NHS Trust on our audit patch. This will be my second set of work at the Trust. Having worked through the full year’s cycle there for 2008/09 I’m looking forward to building on that to get more experience this year.

Posted by: LW