Problems unearthed by an audit have delayed publication of the Department for Education’s annual report and accounts until October. Major government departments are expected to lay their financial reports before the House of Commons adjourns for summer recess each year. But the DfE missed the July 16 deadline. It means the DfE is one of four government departments whose annual report and accounts (ARA) will be certified by the National Audit Office after Parliament returns on September 1. “The NAO is continuing to work with the Department for Education to address matters identified during the course of our audit,” a NAO spokesperson said. “The work required means that the department was unable to publish its annual report and accounts before Parliament’s summer recess. We currently expect to complete our audit in October.” The NAO did not give details of the matters identified. Government departments are not legally bound to publish their ARA before the summer break. Under the government resources and accounts act 2000, departments are legally-bound to send their annual report and accounts to the NAO’s comptroller and auditor general Gareth Davies no later than November 30 after the relevant financial year. The NAO examines and certifies the accounts, issues a report and passes both on to the Treasury by January 15. The Treasury then lays accounts before the House of Commons no later than January 31 the following year. However, both the Treasury and the NAO had set an earlier target for all 17 major government departments to publish their 2025-26 accounts before the summer break. The three other departments that missed the July 16 deadline are the Cabinet Office, the Department of Health and Social Care, and the Ministry of Justice. According to an NAO report from January, nearly two thirds of annual reports were published before the Parliamentary recess in 2024-25, down from a high of 76 per cent in 2018-19. The NAO said delays in recent years were caused by machinery of government changes, cyber-attacks, local audit backlogs and issues identified by audits that “could not be resolved quickly”. The DfE has met the July recess deadline for the last three years but missed the target during the Covid-19 years. The NAO found that the pandemic years had a “detrimental impact” on the timing of audited accounts provided to Parliament. Only 55 per cent of accounts were published on time in 2020-21. The DfE also previously missed the statutory deadline in 2014-15, when it applied a statutory instrument to extend the deadline for laying its accounts by three months. It came after the NAO issued an adverse opinion on DfE’s group financial statements, which considered the level of error and uncertainty in the statements to be “material and pervasive”. The DfE requires further education colleges to publish their own audited accounts by January 31 each year “to maximise transparency and support accountability.”