Governance & board advisory · 03
Governance Instrument Audit
An inventory and currency check of every charter, delegation, policy and register against the enabling Act and the board’s resolutions, with a prioritised gap register. Diagnosis without scoring —…
An inventory and currency check of every charter, delegation, policy and register against the enabling Act and the board’s resolutions, with a prioritised gap register. Diagnosis without scoring — the smaller, cheaper version of the Health-Check.
Councils and public entities before a board review. The smallest useful first engagement, and the one most often followed by a delegations framework.
The audit routinely finds instruments that were adopted but never amended after the enabling Act changed, and instruments that were drafted but never adopted at all. The second category is the dangerous one: the organisation believes it is governed by a document that has no force.
The law it sits under
The framework this work answers to.
Four questions are asked of every governance instrument, and an instrument has to survive all four: does it exist, is it current against the law as it now reads, was it adopted by a resolution that can be produced, and is there evidence it has been applied. Under section 24(3) of the Companies Act a company must keep its records — including minutes and resolutions — for seven years, which is the period an auditor or a regulator will reach back into.
How the engagement runs
What you are committing to.
Every instrument in the organisation is listed and tested against those four questions, producing a register with a status against each. The output distinguishes what is missing from what exists but was never adopted, because the second is the more dangerous finding and the easier fix — an unadopted policy is remedied by one resolution.
The instrument audit is usually the cheapest way to find out how much governance work an organisation actually needs, and it frequently shows the answer is less than the board feared.
Related pages, tools and documents
The self-checks and working documents below are free, need no email address, and are the quickest way to judge the work before commissioning any of it.
Start here
Tell us the decision your organisation needs to make.
The first conversation is thirty minutes, confidential and free. You will leave it knowing which of our services you need and which you do not.