nao

name	nao
description	Query the National Audit Office — Parliament's external auditor of UK central government. Wraps the NAO WordPress REST API and reports RSS feed for published value-for-money reports, financial audits, investigations, and good-practice guides. Use when the question is about an NAO report, audit findings on a department or programme, or what reports the Public Accounts Committee is likely to take evidence on next. NAO reports feed PAC; pair with the `committees` facility for the resulting parliamentary scrutiny.
license	Open Government Licence v3.0 (Crown copyright, NAO)
metadata	{"facility":"nao","cli-alias":"nao","base-url":"https://www.nao.org.uk","provenance":{"tier":3,"operator":"National Audit Office (NAO)","service":"www.nao.org.uk","upstream-data":"NAO's own published reports + investigations + good-practice guides + financial audit opinions","citation-short":"via National Audit Office","citation-formal":"National Audit Office report, retrieved {date}, OGL v3.0","confidence":"authoritative","confidence-notes":"Authoritative for NAO's own published findings. NAO is constitutionally independent of government but answerable to Parliament via the Public Accounts Commission and the Public Accounts Committee."}}

National Audit Office

Base URL: https://www.nao.org.uk

The NAO is Parliament's external auditor of central government. Its ~60 reports a year drive most of the Public Accounts Committee's agenda: when a department wastes money, fails delivery, or runs an IT project off the rails, the NAO publishes a Value-for-Money report; PAC then summons the Accounting Officer for evidence.

There is no documented JSON API for NAO. The library wraps two functional surfaces:

Surface	Path	What
WP REST	/wp-json/wp/v2/posts	Posts (reports) by id, search term, date, category
RSS	/reports/feed/	Recent reports as XML for tracking

CLI

parl nao reports --search "defence" --take 5             # WP search
parl nao reports --after 2025-01-01 --take 20            # reports since date
parl nao report 12345                                     # one report by WP id
parl nao feed --text                                      # recent reports RSS
parl nao categories                                       # topic taxonomy

Reports include the standard WP title.rendered, excerpt.rendered, content.rendered, slug, date, modified, and a link to the published page on nao.org.uk.

Joins to Parliament

• NAO report → PAC inquiry: nearly every NAO Value-for-Money report is taken up by the Public Accounts Committee. Search PAC inquiries by the same topic terms to find the resulting evidence session and PAC report. The lag is typically 4–10 weeks.
• NAO report → debate: PAC reports themselves are debated; use hansard search-debates --term with the report's headline phrase.
• Departmental audit opinion → Estimates: NAO certifies the Resource Accounts of each department; cross-reference with the department's Main and Supplementary Estimates from bills (Supply and Appropriation Bills).

Caveats

• Catalogue is WordPress. Field shapes follow WP conventions (title.rendered, content.rendered, HTML-encoded). The underlying PDF reports are linked from the post body.
• No structured authoring metadata. Specific recommendations, the audited body, the spend at risk — these live in the body text, not as discrete fields. Plain-text extraction required for structured questions.
• Categories are coarse. "Defence", "Health", "Tax" etc.; not finer than departmental level.

Provenance to cite

Tier 3 — third-party (National Audit Office), authoritative.

• Inline cite: "(via National Audit Office)" — once per paragraph.
• For formal output, name the report title and date: "NAO, 'Investigation into the British Steel pension scheme', published {date}, retrieved {date2}". Each WP post has date (publication) and a link (the canonical nao.org.uk URL).
• NAO is statutorily independent but is not a body of Parliament. Don't conflate NAO findings with PAC conclusions — PAC takes evidence on NAO reports and issues its own (often sharper) report; cite each separately.
• See ../../docs/provenance.md.