‘Powers bestowed to the AG office helped to improve accountability’

Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke says the enhanced powers bestowed to the AG’s office in 2019 have helped the office improve accountability.

Maluleke says these powers are a mechanism to help strengthen accountability in the public sector. This is to lessen and/or prevent corruption and material irregularities. Maluleke was speaking at a media breakfast in Pretoria on Thursday.

In 2019, the AG’s office was granted powers to ensure compliance by accounting officers. Failure to do so, the AG’s office may have to exercise its powers according to the Public Finance Management Act amended in 2016.

These powers come in different phases which lead up to the issuing of a certificate of debt should the accounting officer fail at each given phase.

Maluleke says these powers have helped strengthen accountability.

“The intent of our mandate or the extension of our mandate or the expansion of our mandate is for us to improve accountability and consequence management, which actually should be attended to by the standards of public institutions and public resources those that head up departments, municipalities or entities. They’ve been appointed to do this work, it is up to them in the first instance to create controls that prevent problems to have the type of controls that disciplines and monitoring activities that help them detect problems quickly when they arrive and act on them.”

Maluleke says the AG’s office has identified an issue of culture that needs to be addressed in municipalities. She says this culture that leads to qualified and unqualified audits by the office.

Meanwhile, Maluleke says in the financial year 2022/23, only one of the eight metros received a clean audit.

“Big municipalities also struggle. The metros don’t do much better, the same issues we keep raising on the smaller municipalities, we equally raise on metros. Of the eight metros only one had a clean audit this year, the others where unqualified and some qualified. The same issues we raise also need attention in the metros.”

The Auditor-General urges the public sector to fix controls in efforts to avoid recurrence of losses. Financial year 2022/23 the office found 240 material financial losses estimated at R14.34-billion from 240 municipalities.

In the same period, the office managed to recover financial losses of just over R1 billion.