Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has on October 6, awarded departments and entities for achieving clean and unqualified audit outcomes noting that there has been a steady increase in the number of departments and entities achieving clean audits over the past three years.
Seven departments and 14 entities received clean audits while the seven departments and four entities received unqualified audit opinions in the 2023/24 financial year.
Six departments sustained their clean audit opinions from the previous financial year. The Community Safety improved from an unqualified audit to a clean audit. Premier Lesufi noted that seven departments remained stagnant on unqualified opinions with findings in the current year.
“We need to encourage them to work hard to get the clean audit. We also need to pay our service providers within 30 days and support the departments that are struggling,” said Lesufi.
He said he was proud that no department got disclaimer or unqualified audit opinion.
“While there are no regressions in the current year’s audit outcomes, there are notable stagnations on unqualified audit opinion with findings from seven departments,” said Lesufi.
He further said the Gauteng government was committed to maintaining the clean audits that have been achieved, and at the same time improving audit outcomes of other departments and entities going forward.
“We will intensify internal controls to ensure that we do not regress,” said Lesufi.
He singled out the G-Fleet for starting with a disclaimer to qualify but in the last two years, it has achieved a clean audit. Lesufi said this was a demonstration that it is doable.
He also said the provincial government was working on strengthening the forensic unit in the Office of the Premier and creating a mini-forfeiture unit to deal with all the small cases instead of taking them to Special
Investigating Unit.
Meanwhile, the Head and Chief Executive of the Special Investigating Unit, Advocate Andy Mothibi, said as part of corruption prevention, the SIU was looking at awareness, education, and lifestyle audits amongst other things.
“The lifestyle audit is a chapter on its own under the prevention. As part of rolling out the important work of the government of ensuring that we are proactive in fighting maladministration. At this stage, he said 19 accounting officer-level lifestyle audits have
been done, which include CEOs and HODs.
“We have concluded this process, and the report has been presented to the premier. We found that 37% of the audited accounting officers were high risks or they failed the test. Sixteen (16 %) were found to be medium risk while 47 % were low risk. We require that action must be taken against those that failed,” said Mothibi.
By Simphiwe Nkosi