Public sector specialist accountants in demand

Despite substantial budget cuts, redundancies and debates around pay freezes across the public sector, there is still a number of accounting and finance roles available as there is simply a deficit of the right skills available to do the job. We were expecting an influx of accountants to the interim market, however in many areas of the UK this hasn’t been the case.

Specialist accountants are in huge demand and are more than likely to be able to secure premium rates for interim assignments.

If you are a Housing Revenue Accountant (HRA); Children’s & Young People Services (CYPS) Accountant, Adult Social Care & Health Accountant (ASCH), Foundation Trust Specialist (FT), Commissioning Accountant and International Financial Reporting Standards Specialist or have senior finance experience in local government or NHS, you are in huge demand and are more than likely to be able to secure premium rates for interim assignments.

We look at some of the causes of the lack of skills:

• Housing Revenue Accountant. As an induction to local government accountants gained experience in HRA, but as the number of hired trainees decrease, so does the talent pool of candidates that have the skills to work in this highly technical and complex area of finance – an area which current employees have been reluctant to move into. This has left a number of local authorities with no clear succession plan creating a large skills gap.
• Children’s & Young People Services finance is arguably one of the most difficult areas to recruit into on a temporary or permanent basis. This is due to the highly specialist nature of the area and continuous pressure to deliver service improvements. Similar to HRA, in a number of local authorities, there has been a lack of succession planning and limited opportunity to move across to this area of finance due to the specialist nature of the role.
• Adult Social Care & Health Finance interims have become more in demands since the government has announced budget cuts within this service area. There is an increasing pressure to continue delivering a high level of service at reduced costs, which has forced local authorities to turn to interims who have performed similar cost cutting exercises. The demand has increased following the government’s introduction of ‘Personalisation’ as an initiative of this scale has required a substantial number of highly specialist resources to administer the change to the required standards.
• Foundation Trust specialists are currently in high demand due to the pending deadline for applications submission. Many of the NHS Trusts have lean structures and limited internal resources to allocate to this project, which forces them to look for external expertise and interim specialists. With permanent staff reluctant to accept secondments and experienced FT interims contracts being extended due to slow moving application processes, affected by budget constraints, the result is a major deficit of FT specialists across the UK.
• Commissioning accountants. Due to the requirement for substantial savings across the public sector there has been a push for an improvement in contract management and Value for money. Commissioning and contract management are seen as areas where immediate large savings can be made. Organisations often struggle to find these resources internally and regularly turn to interim specialists for help. Commissioning continues to be a highly paid and sought after experience in the current market and a number of roles remain unfilled.
• International Financial Reporting Standards. As a new reporting standard to local government, Implementation of IFRS demands a substantial amount of resource to be invested into the various components of the process, which has been hard to achieve for many organisations. With availability of IFRS candidates with NHS and now even local government experience, authorities are choosing to buy into the expertise at an extremely high cost. However, candidates with experience of IFRS within the Public Sector remain scarce.

If public sector organisations cannot secure accountants in these highly specialised areas some employers are concerned that they will have difficulty in meeting deadlines and savings targets, lose funding and their overall rating will suffer.