The Principal Officer Competition was run by the Public Appointments Service (PAS), which is an independent, statutory body which provides professional recruitment and selection services to the civil and public service. PAS have confirmed that during the course of the quality assurance process, their test provider identified an issue with the Critical Analysis test which affected the scoring of a small number of candidates. All of the candidates impacted were contacted on Tuesday 5 September, 2017, informed of the issue, and assured that the necessary action was taken so that no candidate was disadvantaged as a result.
PAS continually monitor all their processes with regard to competitions to ensure as much as is possible that issues such as this are avoided.