Only 5% of S.Africa’s municipalities get clean audit

Only five percent of municipalities in South Africa got a clean audit in the past fiscal year, partly due to a lack of qualified financial officials, the chief auditor said Monday.

Auditor-general Terence Nombembe said in 71 percent of the audited municipalities, the poor audit outcomes for the 2010-11 financial year were due to a lack of qualified staff.

“While a lack of dedicated capacity is at the root of the weaknesss in service delivery reporting, the skills gap is most pronounced in the financial discipline,” Nombembe said in a report released Monday.

“People have not been able to do their work. Officials in key positions at more than 70 percent of the auditees do not have the minimum competencies and skills required to perfom their jobs,” he said.

Impunity also played a role, where officials are not held accountable for their failures even as ratepayers frequently stage protests over shabby public services.

“When officials and political leaders are not held accountable for their actions, the perception could be created that such behaviour and its results are acceptable and tolerated,” he said.

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said that if public officials fail to perform, “then we must increasingly develop, with our partner departments, effective enforcement mechanism that will ensure that they do act in terms of the law”.

The report showed that in nearly half of the audited municipalities, contracts were awarded to employees, councillors or other government officials while spending often went uncontrolled.

“Unauthorised, irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditure was incurred by 86 percent of the auditees” while 84 percent of them failed to take steps to prevent such expenditure, it said.

None of the municipalities in Gauteng province, which houses the capital Pretoria and the commercial hub of Johannesburg, produced a clean audit.