Lifestyle audits to put staff on the spot

THE STAR

The Executive Mayor of Ekurhuleni, Clr Mondli Gungubele. File photo: Dumisani Dube

Related Stories

• Gauteng department ‘wasting money’
• Half Gauteng agencies get clean audits

Johannesburg - Senior municipal officials in Ekurhuleni are to be subjected to routine lifestyle audits to verify why their lifestyle does not match their salaries.

This was announced by executive mayor Mondli Gungubele on Tuesday when delivering his 2013 State of the City address.

He said the audits were part of the council’s anti-fraud and anti-corruption strategy involving Special Investigating Unit members.

“In the process of conducting routine audits… we have uncovered massive fraud and corruption. During this financial year, we will introduce the practice of conducting lifestyle audits on employees who hold strategic positions, whose lifestyle appears to be contrary to their earnings.

“We anticipate that there will be resistance, but we are determined that, for as long as we won’t be breaking any law, the practice should go ahead,” he said.

The mayor added that a process to review the performance of all municipal entities had been set up, and should be completed in the next two months. He said the report would be presented to the council in June.

Gungubele said the council was overhauling the municipality’s performance system to ensure an improved functioning of the mayoral cluster system.

Crucial to this, Gungubele added, was to align the score cards of members of the mayoral committees with those of their respective heads of department.

The mayor said he was heartened by the reduction in backlogs in unresolved and outstanding disciplinary cases from 256 at the end of the 2011/12 financial year to 94 last month.

Gungubele was not pleased that the municipality had not achieved its revenue collection target of 93 percent. The current rate is 92 percent.

The Star