Central Government

BDO’s central government team provides advisory services to central government departments and their arm’s-length-bodies (ALBs).  We pride ourselves on a joined up approach offering integrated solutions across audit, corporate finance, forensic accounting, organisational restructuring, risk and governance advisory. 

Trends and key issues

Central government bodies face a period of significant change as a result of:

• Unprecedented budget reductions in the 2010 Spending Review
• The rollback of the quango state, to focus on providing only technical specialism’s, necessary impartiality or transparency
• A renewed focus on achieving efficiency savings through improved procurement, shared back office functions and competitive outsourcing

These changes mean central government and its delivery bodies will need to be reshaped, both in terms of their role and how they go about their business. 

Reshaping any organisation so fundamentally is a real challenge, all the more so for central government bodies which have not experienced anything so radical in this generation.  This is a two stage process:

Stage 1: Identifying the solution - understanding what functions government needs to perform and how that can be achieved with limited resources.

Stage 2: Implementing the change - which requires a structured plan that can be flexed and used to monitor progress towards the identified solution.

BDO has developed specific tools to support public sector organisations in both stages.  Using our knowledge of central government departments and ALBs we can help organisations to successfully achieve the transformation required.

Our experience of central government and ALBs covers the spectrum of organisational structures and is across the range of our service offering.