The latest audit results of South African municipalities, released on Wednesday, show the money pumped into municipalities compliments of taxpayers and ratepayers continue to be mismanaged by many of the country's municipalities.
At a media briefing to release the results for period July 1, 2017, to June 30, 2018, Auditor General Kimi Makwetu revealed only 18 of the 257 municipalities assessed received clean audits while half were unqualified.
"These undesirable state of deteriorating audit outcomes shows that various local government role players have been slow in implementing and in many instances even disregarded the audit office recommendations," he said.
"As a result, the accountability for financial and performance management continues to worsen in most municipalities."
Twelve of the municipalities with clean audits were in the Western Cape, two in the Eastern Cape and one each in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, the Northern Cape, and Mpumalanga. Not a single municipality in the Free State, Limpopo and the North West provinces achieved a clean audit.
Only 19% of municipalities could provide auditors with financial statements without material misstatements. A material misstatement is defined as untrue information in a financial statement that could affect the financial decisions of one who relies on the statement.
The percentage of municipalities which had findings against them for non-compliance with supply chain management policies increased from 72 to 82.
Irregular expenditure remains a multi-billion rand problem, and although a slight decrease was recorded from R29.7 billion to R25.2 billion, Makwetu said this picture could change.
"The amount could be even higher, as 46% of the municipalities were either qualified on the incomplete disclosure of irregular expenditure or disclosed in the financial statements that they did not know the full extent of irregular expenditure," Makwetu said.
Irregular spending refers to money spent in contravention of supply chain management policies and could in some cases be an indication of corruption.
- African News Agency (ANA)
