THE Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is putting a number of strategic measures in place to specifically improve audit outcomes in view of the Qualified Audit Report issued by the Auditor General for the 2019/20 financial year, which ended 30 June 2020.
Dr Malcolm Figg, Member of the Mayoral Committee for Budget and Treasury, said he noted the report with concern and that various systems and procedures are being implemented to deal with these matters.
The findings include unauthorised expenditure of R253 million, irregular expenditure of R1,3 billion, a lack of consequence management and under expenditure of the drought relief grant by R188,1 million and R307,3 million of the urban settlements development grant.
Even though the municipality managed to win a landmark court case against a former senior human settlements manager, resulting in a cost order by the Port Elizabeth High Court of approximately R12 million, the Auditor General found that consequence management strategies are lacking as no investigations were lodged or money recovered from guilty parties.
“Since I ascended to the Mayoral Committee position of Budget and Treasury in December 2020, numerous existing tools – to ensure efficiency – were strengthened and additional measures were put in place to deal with consequence management concerns,” said Dr Figg.
“We established the Disciplinary Board that operates independently and can take action to address malfeasance by political office bearers and municipal officials. In addition, new members were appointed to serve on the Audit Committee.
“In addition, the Acting City Manager heads up the Clean Audit Steering Committee where senior officials from the various directorates are represented to work towards addressing all the audit findings by the Auditor General.
“We are especially aware of the ongoing investigations by the Special Investigations Unit to investigate a toilet tender awarded as part of the municipality’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Figg added.
“In addition, the R20,2 million paid out on 19 December 2018 for drain cleaning services that was never delivered are also prominently listed as areas requiring attention.
“The Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) highlighted these issues during a recent visit. We are providing our full cooperation to address them.”
Improvements
In the 2019/20 financial year, the number of audit qualifications were reduced from seven items in 2018/19 to four items in 2019/20.
The unauthorised expenditure qualified item has been addressed in the 2020/21 financial year bringing the number of qualifications items down from four to three, which already represent a significant improvement.
