Role is based in Northwood. Can work at other MOD locations with regular travel to Northwood.
Job Summary
As the Defence integrator, Strategic Command (UKStratCom) sits at the heart of Defence, giving us the winning edge in an ever-uncertain and competitive world. Every single operation relies on the connectivity and skills we offer the whole of the Armed Forces. The UKStratCom Finance Function supports multiple Service Directorates – the Headquarters; Defence Medical Services; Defence Intelligence; Defence Digital; Special Forces; National Cyber Force; Directorate of Overseas Bases; Defence Support; and Permanent Joint Headquarters. Following implementation of Finance Transformation (FinTx) in January 2025, the function is now made up of over 180 finance personnel across Finance Operations, Specialist Services, Finance Business Partnering Teams and Finance Military Operations.
The Finance Reporting and Accountancy team sit under Specialist Services and provide technical accounting guidance for the complex business areas under Strategic Command, to ensure accurate reflection of activity and an accurate financial accounts that feed into the wider MOD position. The post holder is the lead when working with the National Audit Office during the audit weeks, as well as the trusted advisor to the Senior Leadership Team, finance business partners and business areas on various accounting matters, working closely with MOD centre equivalents.
This position is advertised at 37 hours per week, with expected office attendance of 60%, with regular travel to Northwood.
Job Description
Financial Reporting and Accounting are expected to manage the production of their financial reporting, ensuring required processes are in place to give assurance on the quality of the numbers. Providing a suitably robust input to be incorporated into the MOD financial accounts, whilst highlighting key issues, risks, and opportunities. Managing other external reporting outputs including responses to Parliamentary Questions and FOIs. They will offer accounting advice and work with finance colleagues and auditors to agree accounting treatments.
Providing insight to the Business, Finance Leadership Team, and wider Finance teams
- Managing the production, including appropriate review and escalation where necessary of the organisation’s financial accounts, for presentation to the Finance Director for review and approval, highlighting key issues through analysis.
- Reviewing, analysing, and interpreting financial data, providing insight for senior managers and decision makers.
- Inputting and drafting reports to Audit Committee and other key stakeholders on the key features of the financial accounts and status of key issues and risks.
Routine Requirements
- Managing the audit programme, undertaking engagement with Strategic Head Office and/or auditors providing updates on material or complex issues, monitoring progress of audits, outstanding audit issues and implementation of recommendations.
- Working with the Financial Governance and Control team to ensure suitable controls / checks are in place, such as compliance with accounting standards and financial policy, to maintain accuracy and identify/escalate issues.
- Providing accounting / tax advice, engaging with the Technical Accounting and Tax Centres of Excellence to agree accounting treatments as required.
- Supporting Strategic Head office in implementing new accounting standards, or changes made to existing rules, managing the collation of information to understand the organisational impact.
- Providing support and guidance to ensure material losses follow the appropriate approvals route.
- Ensuring the integrity of data collected for use in the Annual Report and Accounts (ARAc), Estimates and other statutory external reporting processes e.g. NAO reviews and managing:
- Monthly reconciliations, providing analysis and challenging transactions, translating into a non-technical format to advise the Budget Holder of their financial position, informing monthly reviews with their FBP.
- Engaging with the Business to obtain information to complete returns (e.g. transparency reporting or losses and special payments).
- Review of control accounts, to ensure that transactions are legitimate and providing support to Defence Business Services to aid reconciliation, as required.
Continuous improvement
- Dedicating time to sharing best practice and ideas for refining standardised processes and procedures feeding back key proposed changes to process owners, enabling consistency across the MOD finance function.
- Seeking feedback on the services provided, testing, and evaluating their effectiveness, whilst assessing the level of effort to deliver against the benefit received.
- Continuously strive to improve the service provision, promptly addressing issues and ensuring that processes or ways of working are adapted, and customers are informed where there is an impact.
- Managing issues highlighted during internal or external audit, engaging relevant stakeholders to enable corrective action. Promptly addressing any misinterpretation of guidance, sharing with team members to promote embedding the lesson(s) learnt.
- Managing the input and support to change programmes, where there is an impact to how your team will provide their services.
Managing your team
- Management of team members, empowering, motivating and coaching to enable effective delivery.
- Supporting individual’s personal development, careers and developing leadership skills within their team. Ensuring you and the team make time to develop themselves and their peers.
- Being open to challenge and new ideas, sharing of knowledge and experience, encouraging others through building a supportive team environment.
- Providing stretching targets ensuring the team are getting the basics right at the first attempt.
- Developing and embedding the use of standardised processes to deliver a consistent output to customers.
Making all major decisions affecting direction and execution of work within the area of responsibility, referring upwards where decisions relate to significant issues of policy, resource allocation or management of work area.
Person specification
Essential
- Qualified with an CCAB accountancy qualification.
- An excellent leader and manager, who will empower their team to deliver whilst providing support and guidance to develop them, you will lead colleagues across Finance and the Service Directorates through significant change to ways of working, process re-engineering, automation, training and tooling.
- Significant Experience in a Finance environment with Technical Expertise with an ability to understand and interpret complex business and financial requirements and accounting technical application.
- A strong communicator, with the ability to discuss with various stakeholders, from finance and non-finance functions.
Desirable
- An understanding of how MOD / Strategic Command Strategic operates given the breadth and diversity and its highly delegated model.
- Experience of Agile Delivery and Scrum.
- An excellent ability to balance a range of competing priorities drawing on good judgement, initiative and able to coordinate the team accordingly.
- A self-starter capable of working independently from high-level strategic direction.
- Strong written and oral briefing skills.
Qualifications
Qualified with an CCAB accountancy qualification.
Behaviours
We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:
- Leadership
- Communicating and Influencing
- Delivering at Pace
- Making Effective Decisions
Alongside your salary of £59,690, Ministry of Defence contributes £17,292 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.
Some Of The Many Benefits You Will Receive:
- Highly competitive pension scheme.
- Flexi-time scheme upon completion of six months service or the Line Manager has the ability to adopt flexible working sooner than the 6 month period.
- With Line Manager agreement move to an alternative Working Patterns (there are nine).
- 25 days paid annual leave rising (one day per year) to 30 days upon completion of five years’ service. If by chance you have previously completed service in the Public Sector in the past five years, you may be eligible to request 30 days leave immediately. (Evidence will be required).
- In addition to annual leave you will be entitled to eight Public Bank Holidays per year.
- Professional and Personal Development of skills with the opportunity to undergo an Apprenticeship in Human Resources.
- Opportunity to join more than one of our many networks (Race, LGBT+, Gender, Disability and Faith & Belief).
- Minimum of 18 Days Special Paid Leave in a rolling 12-month period for Public Duties commitments (such as a Magistrate).
- Special Paid Leave for community volunteering up to 12 days a year for Special Constables and six days a year for other volunteering.
- Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave.
- Other facilities are Sports & Social facilities and a Gym complex, as well as onsite Mess & Retail shops.
- Learning and development tailored to your role.
- An environment with flexible working options.
- A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
- A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%
Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. This is a non-contractual arrangement where all office-based employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in office, subject to capacity and any required workplace adjustments. Requirements to attend other locations for official business, or work in another MOD office, will also count towards this level of attendance. Applicants can request further information regarding how this may work in their team from the Vacancy Holder (see advert for contact details). Defence Business Services cannot respond to any questions about working arrangements.
The post does not offer relocation expenses.
External recruits who join the MOD who are new to the Civil Service will be subject to a six-month probation period.
Please Note: Expenses incurred for travel to interviews will not be reimbursed.
Please be advised that the Department is conducting a review of all pay related allowances which could impact on those allowances that the post currently being advertised attracts.
Any move to MOD from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments. You may however be eligible for other government schemes, including Tax-Free Childcare. Determine your eligibility at https://www.childcarechoices.gov.uk/.
The Ministry of Defence is committed to providing a safe and healthy working environment for its staff which includes educating them on the benefits of not smoking, protecting them from the harmful effects of second-hand smoke and supporting those who want to give up smoking. Under the Smoke-Free Working Environment policy, Smoking and the use of all tobacco products (including combustible and chewing tobacco products) will not be permitted anywhere in the Defence working environment however some exemptions are in place, please refer to local guidance. The policy is Whole Force and includes all Defence personnel, contractors, visitors and other non-MOD personnel. All applicants seeking, considering, or accepting employment with the Ministry of Defence should be aware of this policy and that it is already in place at a number of Defence Establishments.
MOD Recruitment Satisfaction Survey – We may contact you regarding your experience to help us improve our customer satisfaction. The survey is voluntary and anonymous. You may however be given the opportunity to provide additional information to help us improve our service which includes the collection of some personal data as defined by the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). The MOD Privacy Policy Notice sets out how we will use your personal data and your rights.
Selection process details
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.
At sift, you will be assessed against your CV, Statement of suitability and the following:
Experience:
- A Personal Statement (no more than 750 words) explaining how your personal skills, qualities and experience provide evidence of your suitability for the role.
- A CV setting out your career history, qualification details, experience with key responsibilities and achievements. Please ensure you have provided reasons for any gaps within the last two years.
The CV and Personal Statement will be assessed at sift and are weighted equally in their scoring, so it’s important to consider this when uploading your application. Failure to submit both documents will mean the panel only have limited information on which to assess your application against the criteria in the person specification.
When choosing your Behaviour examples, please make sure you use real life scenarios that relate to your own experiences. Whilst technology may help to enhance your written submission, presenting the ideas of others or those generated by technology, could result in your application being rejected.
Behaviour
At interview, you will be assessed against the following:
- Leadership
- Delivering at Pace
- Communicating and Influencing
- Making Effective Decisions
The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equality of opportunity. There is a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.
If you need to advise us that you need additional help or reasonable adjustments for the recruitment process, please contact: DBSCivPers-Resourcingteam3@mod.gov.uk .
As a result of the changes to the UK immigration rules which came in to effect on 1 January 2021, the Ministry of Defence will only offer sponsorship for a skilled worker visa under the points based system, where a role has been deemed to be business critical. This role does not meet that category and we will not sponsor a visa. It is therefore NOT open to applications from those who will require sponsorship under the points based system.
Should you apply for this role and be found to require sponsorship, your application will be rejected and any provisional offer of employment withdrawn.
Strategic Command is going through a significant transformation programme which aims to improve the way the Command conducts its business and delivers for Defence and the nation. As a consequence of this, all posts within Strategic Command Headquarters and in time the wider organisation, are/will be subject to review and potential changes as we continuously improve across the period of the transformation programme. These changes may be minor or could be more substantive and will generate new opportunities. Throughout, the Command’s transformation programme is committed to following the MOD’s framework on managing and supporting people through the change process and places an emphasis on early and open consultation and engagement with the Command’s personnel and Trade Unions.
Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.
This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.
Security
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.
Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).
People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.
Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check.
Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).
Nationality requirements
Open to UK nationals only.
Working for the Civil Service
The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.
We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission’s recruitment principles (opens in a new window).
The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.
The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.
The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.
We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission’s recruitment principles (opens in a new window).
The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.
The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.
Diversity and Inclusion
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).
This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.
Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.
Contact point for applicants
Job Contact :
- Name : Jackie Parkinson
- Email : jacqueline.parkinson115@mod.gov.uk
Recruitment team
- Email : DBSCivPers-Resourcingteam3@mod.gov.uk
Further information
Please ensure you read the attached candidate information document prior to completing your application. If you are dissatisfied with the service you have received from DBS, or believe that DBS has failed to follow the recruitment process in line with the Civil Service Commission principles of selection for appointment on merit on the basis of Fair and Open competition, you can raise a formal complaint by writing to DBS at the following address: Defence Business Services, Scanning Hub, Room 6124, Tomlinson House, Norcross Lane, Blackpool, FY5 3WP. If after raising your complaint with DBS you remain dissatisfied you can complain directly to the Civil Service Commission at the following address: Civil Service commission, Room G/8, 1 Horse Guards Road, London, SW1A 2HQ Or by email: info@csc.gov.uk.#J-18808-Ljbffr…