Cape Town - Senior officials in Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s office were grilled for hours over R70 million spent on outsourcing forensic audits over the past five years and the department’s failure to table any of its audit reports with the audit committee.
Presenting her department’s annual report before the province’s standing committee on the premier on Tuesday, Zille said the Western Cape government had made significant progress in strengthening good governance over the past five years.
But ANC MPLs were not interested in her rosy outlook, leading the charge to expose the irregularities in Zille’s department.
Henriette Robson, the department’s deputy director-general of corporate assurance, had a particularly tough time, with the chamber being cleared at one stage as MPLs discussed behind closed doors issues of non-compliance and appointments.
The leader of the official opposition, Marius Fransman, and ANC MPL Cameron Dugmore quizzed Zille and her team over issues of good governance, internal controls, standards being lowered during appointment processes and non-compliance. Dugmore said the annual report stated “none of the reports have been tabled at the audit committee for the period under review”.
In it the audit committee expressed concerns and even raised the issue with the chief audit executive.
“Corrective actions have been agreed with the accounting officer and the implementation thereof is being monitored by the audit committee on a quarterly basis,” the report read.
Responding to Dugmore, the department’s chief director internal audits, James Radebe, conceded that reports had not been delivered but added that the reports were presented to the chief audit executive for review.
“Those reports could not be issued within the financial year because there were aspects that I needed the team to go back and work on and subsequently some of the reports were issued,” he said.
Zille in turn said: “It is obviously very concerning if reports aren’t tabled and I am informed that very strong remedial action was taken, and that the person responsible for insuring that those reports were tabled is no longer in the employ of the province and that problem will not recur.
“More than 90 percent of the forensic investigation unit’s recommendations were followed up by the departments in the period under review.
“The outsourcing of the function to a private company has now come to an end. It was very worthwhile, while it lasted, to catch up and to get the basis stable,” Zille said.
They had also significantly reduced the age of outstanding cases.
But Fransman questioned the premier about the possible abuse of power in the system and the “working out” of individuals from the system when fault lines were identified.
She responded: “We don’t work people out of the system - we keep people accountable.”
Tackling the issue of efficiency and sustainable reduced cost, Fransman said he was concerned about the R70 m spent on forensic outsourcing over the past five years.
Zille snapped back: “If you compare that to the R38 billion on fruitless and wasteful expenditure by the national government, then I think it’s worth investing in forensic audit functions and I think it was worth investing in fixing up the mess that we inherited.
“And the fact is we inherited a complete mess, the forensic unit was not properly staffed, which hardly ever kept up to date, in fact we inherited a massive backlog on cases and so poorly qualified were most of the staff that they were not in a position to stop corruption.”
She strongly urged other provinces and national government to do the same so billions were not lost.
Cape Argus