Tshwane only metro that presented unreliable financials: AG

Auditor-General Tsakane Maluleke has highlighted Tshwane as the only Metro, that has presented unreliable financials.

This came out during her presentation of the consolidated general report on the local government audit outcomes for the financial year 2021/2022 in Parliament earlier.

She found that only 38 municipalities out of 257 achieved clean audits and municipalities racked up almost R4.7 billion in fruitless and wasteful expenditure and R25 billion in unauthorised expenditure.

She says many municipalities are failing on almost every metric of good governance and integrity.

“Tshwane is one of the eight metros and it’s the only one that has an adverse audit opinion. The financials that they gave us could not be relied upon, we were unable to confirm to our individual, independent audit assessment as the office of the AG, that those financials are credible. Tshwane is one of those big municipalities that should concern all of us because the audit outcome that we issued at the end of the last financial year was the culmination of the number of years of weaknesses that continued to be ignored by the leadership of the city, and the audit outcomes went backwards. And it does correlate with the service delivery issues, with the infrastructure maintenance issues.”