Tynwald’s Auditor General, Stephen Warren, has called on members to press ahead with changes to the island’s public audit law, warning that little has moved since they endorsed his recommendations in July last year, according to Manx Radio.
His comments appear in a new report, due to be laid before Tynwald Court, the joint sitting of the House of Keys and Legislative Council. It answers a Treasury paper on reforming public audit, which members debated in July.
Mr Warren first put forward his recommendations in 2024. In the new report he calls the lack of movement since Tynwald’s resolution “disappointing” and says the changes are still “highly necessary”.
He argues that the existing law “fails in several key areas to match the requirements of accepted international standards for a supreme audit institution”, the term used for a jurisdiction’s top public audit body.
The shortfalls he singles out concern how independent his office is and how freely it is able to operate. The report also covers the Auditor General’s functions and remit, the governance relationships around his office, and enforcement once an audit has been completed.
Mr Warren acknowledges that the Treasury has raised “legitimate questions about implementation, proportionality, resources and safeguards”.
However, he argues that the department has not produced enough evidence to warrant altering the substance of what he proposed in 2024.
His “central concern”, he says, is the way the Treasury approached parts of the subject. Several points its paper presents as questions of “constitutional uncertainty” are, in his view, “properly matters of legislative design”: choices about how the law should be drafted rather than open constitutional questions.
Mr Warren’s report asks Tynwald to act on the resolution it passed in July 2025 rather than revisit the recommendations behind it.
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