Who is the NAO?

The National Audit Office (NAO) is an independent public body that helps Parliament hold government to account for how taxpayers’ money is spent.  Our vital audit work adds value to government by supporting its drive to improve the delivery of public services to millions of people everyday.

Our primary role is to scrutinise public spending for Parliament. We do this by certifying over 350 government accounts and produce around 65 Value for Money (VFM) reports each year.

What is the data science internship?

We are looking to recruit up to three people to participate in our year long, data science internship scheme starting from September 2019.

We expect you will spend most of your time applying strong quantitative and qualitative analytical skills to build and implement analytical tools to support our range of assurance work. For example, take a look at the data visualisations presented on our website

In addition, we also expect you to spend some of your time collaborating with our financial auditors to review high value, high risk quantitative models which underpin accounting estimates. For example, the value of the student loans book, the rate of fraud and error in tax credit and benefit payments and the money needed in the future, to compensate people who have experienced clinical negligence.

What skills are required?

No previous experience of audit is necessary and training will be provided in key Data Science skills such as R, SQL and Tableau dashboard building.

But we have some minimum criteria which you will need to meet:

• 120 UCAS points (from the 2017 tariff) from your top 3 A Level grades (or equivalent) including Maths. General Studies does not count. If you have 104 UCAS points from the 2017 tariff (or equivalent) you may still be eligible to apply – please email HRServiceDesk@nao.org.uk for further details.

• Have an undergraduate degree course with a substantive analytical component such as data science, operational research, mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering, management science, economics (the data science internship is unlikely to be suitable for people studying accounting finance degree courses), where:

   o You are in your second year of a sandwich degree course

   o You are in your final year and are expecting a 2.1 degree or better, or

   o You have completed your undergraduate degree course and achieved a 2.1 degree or better

• You must be a UK, Commonwealth, EEA or Swiss national to comply with Civil Service nationality rules and must hold a valid work permit. We are not able to sponsor work visas.

Some previous programming experience is desirable but not essential

What is the recruitment process?

Please submit your CV and complete the attached application form (applications without a completed application form will not be accepted) where you will be asked to outline:

• Your interest and use of programming languages and/or visual analysis

• an example of where you used quantitative analysis to solve a problem

• an example of working in a team to complete a project to a challenging timescale

For guidance on the application please visit our website.

The deadline for applications is Sunday 2 December 2018.

If you pass the initial application stage, we will invite you to complete a technical exercise followed by a telephone interview. This will then be followed by a final interview.

If you are successful, you will start the internship on 2 September 2019.