In 2023, the Accounts Commission agreed a new approach to local government reporting, moving to a broader suite of shorter outputs, published throughout the year to give more regular and comprehensive commentary on the local government sector. As you’ll know, the first output of this new approach – Local Government in Scotland - Financial Bulletin 2022/23 - was published in January 2024 and this included findings generated from a short data return completed by local auditors. We now need to ask some questions about your council’s agreed 2024/25 budget for an Accounts Commission briefing/blog, and linked data, about council budgets. This data return should not take long to complete as most of the information should be in the budget papers. This data is an important source of evidence for the outputs which will be published in May 2025.