The Western Cape legislature building. File picture: Leon Lestrade
Cape Town - Western Cape business executive at the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) Sharonne Adams told a briefing of the budget committee on the 2019/20 audit outcomes of the Public Finance Management Act for the provincial government that the outcomes for the Western Cape showed a slight regression compared to last year.
Adams said: “There has been an increase of R281 million in irregular expenditure by government departments and public entities in the Western Cape.”
Reacting to the news, budget committee chairperson Deidré Baartman (DA) said: “The continued aim of government should be the elimination of irregular expenditure and the Budget Committee will continue to monitor the situation and future outcomes to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent responsible and most effectively,” said Baartman.
Meanwhile, the committee has welcomed a pledge by the provincial treasury to put further controls in place to curb irregular expenditure in the province and plans to give monthly updates on the matter.
During the question and answer session, ANC committee members Luluma Mvimbi and Nomi Nkondlo asked Adams what was being done specifically to address rising irregular expenditure in the province.
Adams said: “When irregular expenditure is discovered, it must be investigated by the various departments and entities to establish the causes, who should be held accountable and what steps should be taken going forward to ensure it does not re-occur.
“Irregular expenditure is non-compliant with the laws and regulations. It is not ideal to have irregular expenditure disclosed in your financial statements and from the AG’s side, when we have any fraud risks we always alert management to be on the lookout for possible fraud,” said Adams.
“Overall when we look at departments, the outcomes more or less remain exactly the same as the prior year. We’ve also noticed that the one outstanding audit we have is the department of health.”
“The main reason for that outstanding audit is that because the province was basically the epicentre of Covid-19 at the same time we were busy with the auditing process. As such the decision was made to delay the audit process and to start it much later. The audit process is ongoing and we will finalise that report at the end of January 2021,” she said.
Cape Argus
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