How Audit and Accountancy Firms Win Public Sector Work

Public sector audit and accountancy work is advertised across several layers, and the value and the buyer decide which one carries it. Higher-value framework competitions and standalone commissions are advertised on Find a Tender, the UK central platform for regulated procurement. From January 2026 the services thresholds are around 139,688 pounds for central government and 215,720 pounds for sub-central buyers such as councils, NHS trusts, and universities, calculated inclusive of VAT. Unlike legal or health services, audit and accountancy are ordinary services rather than light-touch, so the standard thresholds apply and a lot of this work is genuinely open to competition.

Lower-value assignments are advertised on Contracts Finder, which lists public contracts above 12,000 pounds and which the Central Digital Platform is replacing as the primary notice service under the Procurement Act 2023. A large share of assurance and advisory spend never appears as a fresh open tender at all, because it is called off existing framework agreements through mini-competitions that only appointed suppliers see. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland run their own systems through Audit Scotland, Audit Wales, and the Northern Ireland Audit Office. If you are unsure which platform carries which work, the guide to how to find government tenders is the place to start.

The single most important thing to understand about local government external audit is that you do not win it by responding to a tender notice. The audits of councils, police and fire bodies, national parks, and other principal local bodies are allocated by a national appointing body called Public Sector Audit Appointments, or PSAA. Rather than each body running its own procurement, PSAA runs one large procurement, appoints a small panel of firms, and then allocates each body to an auditor and sets the fee scale. For the second appointing period, covering the audits of 2023/24 to 2027/28, around 470 bodies, some 99 percent of eligible local bodies, opted into the national scheme.

PSAA appointed six firms for that period, and the allocation is heavily concentrated. Grant Thornton performs about 36 percent of the audits, Forvis Mazars around 22.5 percent, Ernst and Young 20 percent, and KPMG 14 percent, with the new entrants Bishop Fleming and Azets Audit Services carrying out 3.75 percent and 3.25 percent respectively. In October 2025 PSAA extended those audit contracts by a further two years, to the 2029/30 audits, to give the system stability while the audit backlog is cleared. The practical message for a firm is blunt: to do mainstream local government external audit you have to be on the PSAA panel, and that door opens only when PSAA runs its next procurement, so watching daily tender feeds will not get you in.

The audit appointment system is being reshaped, and the direction of travel matters for any firm planning its public sector strategy. English local audit has been through a well-documented crisis of delays, with hundreds of councils unable to close their accounts on time, and the government has responded with structural reform. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government issued its plans for local audit reform in April 2025, and the centrepiece is a new Local Audit Office, expected to be established in autumn 2026, that will act as a single system leader responsible for the code of audit practice, oversight, and eventually the appointment function.

That has direct consequences for PSAA and for the market. The Financial Reporting Council acted as shadow systems leader from March 2023 to February 2025, and PSAA is now planning its own transition and eventual closedown as the Local Audit Office takes over, while continuing its appointing person role in the meantime. To clear the backlog, the government also set statutory backstop dates that force audits to be signed off by fixed deadlines, with the 2025/26 audits carrying a backstop of 31 January 2027. For firms, reform means the next appointment round could look different from the last, the fee regime is under review, and the timing of the next big procurement is a moving target, which is exactly the kind of change worth tracking rather than assuming this period will simply roll over.

Away from the centrally allocated external audit, there is a large and genuinely competitive market that is tendered in the normal way, and this is where per-notice monitoring earns its keep. Internal audit is bought separately by almost every public body, and it is delivered by a mix of providers: local-authority-owned shared services such as SWAP Internal Audit Services, NHS internal audit bodies like the Mersey Internal Audit Agency, specialist providers such as TIAA, and mid-tier firms including RSM, BDO, and Azets. Buyers procure it through NHS Shared Business Services frameworks, the Crescent Purchasing Consortium audit services framework used across the education sector, other consortium agreements, and standalone tenders.

Where a single tender covers both, external and internal audit are usually split into separate lots and suppliers are asked to bid on one lot only, because a firm cannot independently audit accounts it has also internally reviewed. Beyond audit itself, public bodies buy a wide band of accountancy and assurance work: grant certification and assurance for funding such as the Levelling Up and shared prosperity programmes, counter-fraud and forensic accounting, financial and actuarial advisory for pensions and treasury, capital and business-case support, VAT and tax advice, and outsourced finance functions. For a mid-tier or specialist professional services firm, this assurance and advisory band is the accessible way into public sector revenue, and it publishes as fresh notices far more often than the audit appointments do.

Public assurance demand is spread across very different buyers, each on its own cycle, which is what makes the market worth watching in full. Local authorities are the largest and most varied buyers: alongside their PSAA-appointed external auditor they commission internal audit, counter-fraud, grant assurance, treasury and pensions advice, and business-case reviews for capital projects, and the guidance on local authority tenders sets out how councils run these procurements. The NHS, meaning trusts, foundation trusts, and integrated care boards, buys internal audit, counter-fraud, and financial advisory, often through NHS-specific frameworks and shared services.

The wider public estate adds steady demand. Universities, colleges, and multi-academy trusts need external audit, internal audit, and regularity assurance, frequently bought through education-sector consortia. Housing associations and registered providers buy audit, treasury, and value-for-money assurance. Police and fire bodies, combined authorities, central government arm's-length bodies, charities, and the many local authority trading companies and joint ventures each need their own audit and accountancy support. Because the same requirement is described as external audit, internal audit, assurance services, or accountancy services depending on the buyer, and because specialisms range from pensions actuarial work to counter-fraud to grant certification, targeting the service lines and buyers you actually win in beats watching any single portal.

Public buyers apply a consistent set of gates before a firm can join a framework or win a commission, and the gates differ by service line. Statutory external audit is the most tightly controlled: the audit must be carried out by a firm, and signed by a Key Audit Partner, registered with a Recognised Supervisory Body such as the ICAEW or ACCA, with the Financial Reporting Council providing independent oversight and inspection of major audits. Independence is enforced hard, which is why the same firm generally cannot provide both the external audit and other services to the same body, and why rotation rules apply over time.

Internal audit carries a different but equally real standard: providers are expected to work to the Public Sector Internal Audit Standards and to employ Chartered Institute of Internal Auditors qualified staff, with an external quality assessment on a defined cycle. Across both, buyers require professional indemnity insurance at the level they specify, ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials or Cyber Essentials Plus for handling sensitive financial and personal data, quality-management evidence such as ISO 9001, conflict-of-interest declarations, social value commitments, and named suitably qualified and experienced staff who will actually do the work rather than a generic firm profile. The how to bid on government contracts guide covers the wider evidence a public buyer expects, and getting these in order before a framework opens saves a scramble later.

Winning public assurance work is a business-development discipline separate from delivering the audit, and firms that treat it that way do best. Start by being honest about which market you are actually chasing. If it is mainstream local government external audit, your route is the next PSAA procurement, so track when it is expected and prepare to compete on capacity, quality, and price at that competition rather than expecting stray notices. If it is internal audit, assurance, and advisory, then decide which service lines and which buyers you genuinely win in, because a scattergun response to every notice wastes senior time; the bid or no-bid decision should be made against your real strengths, independence position, and capacity.

Map the frameworks that cover your work, note when each is due to refresh, and prepare the standing evidence early: registrations, insurance, ISO certifications, quality assessments, case studies, and named staff. When a framework or commission comes up, read the specification and lot structure before drafting, and follow the guide to responding to a tender so your submission answers the evaluation criteria rather than restating your credentials. Use CPV codes to search precisely, since this work is coded under 79210000 accounting and auditing services, 79211000 accounting services, 79212000 auditing services, 79212100 financial auditing, 79212200 internal audit services, 79212300 statutory audit services, 79212400 fraud audit services, and 79220000 fiscal services, and combining those codes with region and value filters beats keyword searching. The same fundamentals that help other government contractors win recurring public work apply here, and smaller practices should read the guidance on SME public sector procurement to compete on specialism rather than scale.

The hard part of public sector assurance work is not writing the bid, it is seeing every relevant framework refresh and standalone commission across hundreds of buyers before the deadline, especially given how the same job is worded so many ways. Internal audit, grant assurance, counter-fraud, actuarial and financial advisory, tax, and external audit for the bodies that sit outside the PSAA scheme, such as foundation trusts, universities, academy trusts, housing associations, town and parish councils, and charities, all publish across Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, NHS Shared Business Services and education-sector portals, the devolved UK systems, and individual buyer e-tendering sites. Jorpex is a cross-source monitor that watches 50+ public procurement sources at once and uses embedding-based semantic matching, so a search set up for assurance services also catches an internal audit framework or a grant certification tender, in any of 17 languages, without relying on exact keywords.

Alerts arrive by Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email in realtime, daily, or weekly digests, with disqualifier filters to screen out work you cannot take and up to five notification profiles on the Pro plan so you can watch external audit, internal audit, and advisory separately. Jorpex Starter is 49 dollars a month and Pro is 149 dollars a month, each with a 14-day free trial and no per-user fees. To be clear about what the tool does and does not do: Jorpex finds and ranks the opportunity, but it does not perform the audit, hold your Recognised Supervisory Body registration, or place you on the PSAA panel. It does make sure that when an internal audit framework, an assurance commission, or the next appointment round is advertised, you see it the day it publishes rather than after it has closed. Firms that pair it with a proper alert setup and disciplined bidding stop finding out about assurance frameworks after the window has shut.