My name is Akhil Patel, I’m an audit manager on the third sector value for money team, and I’ve been at the NAO for four and a half years.
Do I feel my work has an influence?
My work certainly does have an influence, in how many other jobs can you get the opportunity to call a senior government official to account through the work that you do? For example, we publish value for money reports, and these are used by the public accounts committee as evidence, the senior official is called there and has to account for the public money that has been spent and also the effectiveness and efficiency with which he has spent the public money. At the end of the day the public accounts committee publishes a report and makes recommendations which the government has got to respond to, and often they are accepted and the recommendations are therefore implemented and, hopefully, the public services are improved as a result.
What have been my most beneficial aspects of the training and development I have received?
The NAO offers a wide variety of training and development, it runs bespoke training programmes under the banner ‘unlocking our potential’ through which staff access quite a wide variety of personal development courses and they cover topics such as emotional intelligence, persuasion and influence as well as practical case studies, which are always good fun but also quite challenging. A couple of years ago I was selected for the future leaders development programme and through that I have accessed a wide variety of training opportunities, courses on leadership, courses which involve strategic issues such as making the organisation more client focused. But the important thing about training and development is applying what you learn on these courses in the work environment. The office has, for all staff up to the level of audit principal a dedicated development manager who can discuss with you your development needs and try and make your work programme suit those.
What do I enjoy most about my role?
What I enjoy most about my role is the fact that you have access to senior government officials and to documents. Ultimately your work is going to be used to hold public officials to account for the public money that they’ve spent, but in speaking to these senior public officials you can sometimes see the passion and commitment they have to the public good and that to me is very inspiring. But sometimes officials can be quite defensive about the work they are doing because they perceive that the NAO is just here to criticise which, of course, is not the case and that defensiveness can mean that you’ve got to show quite a lot of resilience in making sure that you ask the right questions and get the answers that you need to conduct your audit work.
