SERIOUS concerns raised about council finances have been addressed by an external auditor.

Grant Thornton has completed its audit findings for Herefordshire Council and did not identify any significant control weaknesses.

However, the audit did address errors made in council finance documents and said there were "lessons to be learned."

The leader of Herefordshire Independents, Bob Matthews, and fellow councillors filed a report to the external auditors raising a number of, in their opinion, very serious issues, which the auditor has addressed in its report, in particular the manner in which major project finances are being recorded and monitored.

The external auditor said: "There are clearly lessons to be learned around quality control of financial reporting to committee. It appears to us that these are errors, omissions and oversights rather then there being a deliberate intention to mislead."

The Hereford Times has previously reported how councillors had questioned the accuracy of the reported spend on the Hereford City Link Road project.

Inconsistencies were noted between the spend in prior years reported in the 2015/16 medium term financial strategy (MTFS) approved by council in February 2015, and that reported in the 2016/2017 MTFS approved in February 2016.

Following a review of the relevant tables, it was found that the figures in the “spend in prior years” column of the 2015/16 MTFS had inadvertently included projected spend as well as spend to date.

Councillors were given a revised figure of £10,658,000 up to March 31, 2016.

But the Council's Corporate Budget report for the period up to March 31, presented to the cabinet in June, showed the total spend for the road project as £14,642,000.

And on July 28 at a cabinet meeting the Economic and Corporate Services report presented to cabinet reported that the earlier capital outturn report contained 23 inaccuracies, which resulted in another change to the spend figure on the capital programme of the city link road project.

This latest report says that £6,917,000 was spent in 2015/16 and to the end of March 2016 it was £17,575,000.

Cllr Matthews, Cllr John Hardwick and Cllr Sebastian Bowen submitted a Freedom of Information request to the council asking for a detailed breakdown of the land and property acquisitions costs, and related expenditure in relation to the link road.

In July the council said the spend-to-date on land and associated compensation costs was £10.5m but refused to give a detailed breakdown of each acquisition and withheld this under section (2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.