Vanguard Mkosana
19 October 2006
As from Saturday, 1 April 2006, key innovations have been unleashed by the
Department of Labour (DoL) in an effort to contain bureaucracy and enhance
service delivery. Project management has been introduced as a new way of doing
our business as DoL.
14 projects have been prioritised for this financial year. 250 staff members
are currently undergoing training on project management. Project management has
the advantage of reducing waste of time and resources on bureaucratic detail.
It gets things done and in a measurable way.
We have begun to use it to recognise talent and potential irrespective of
rank staff members occupy. This has been branded a "novelty" in our government
circles.
To improve budgeting and financial management within the DoL we have
introduced Activity Based Costing (ABC) as an add-on to the National Treasury
expectations in line with the prescripts. This is one of the projects we pursue
this year. This project is aimed at eliminating the tendency to leave financial
management to the Chief Financial Officer.
Through ABC all managers are obliged to synchronise their planning,
budgeting and reporting. In this way we will be able to detect if funds are
spent on what they were not budgeted for and also identify possibility of under
or over spending on time.
We have started a process of decentralisation of functions and authority to
the service delivery points of the DoL namely � the Labour Centres and
provincial offices. This is in line with the Positive Employee Philosophy we
have adopted to reduce what we term "Head Office Syndrome."
The key import of this project is that resources and power to decide on
matters relating to the servicing of our clients will be where the bulk of our
clients are. In this way we will reduce the problem of delays we have been
blamed for in the past.
Taken to their logical conclusions the innovations we are embarking upon
have a direct link with the issues that are currently topical in media. The
recent concentrated focus on the negatives has partly served to blur a number
of positive things done by the government. That the report of the DoL is
qualified by the Auditor-General is a matter of concern to us and we have taken
measures to correct this.
However the Auditor-General's (AG's) report read in isolation of the other
related matters can easily be misleading or be interpreted out of context. The
qualification of the DoL report centres on the Asset Register. Our major
problem regarding Asset Management relates to the inherent shortcomings of the
transversal systems used by government.
Local Government Information Systems (LOGIS) which government departments
are obliged to use has inherent shortcomings which impact negatively on asset
management, especially for big departments like DoL. Reference is made of the
assets acquired through Private Public Partnerships (PPP), which were included
in the PPP fixed asset register with no value stated.
The PPP agreement between DoL and Siemens Business Services (SBS) puts
ownership of the Information Technology (IT) assets under the private partner
with the understanding that these assets will revert to the DoL when the
contract expires.
The Accounting Standards Board gave a directive that assets acquired through
PPP should be listed with their value under the department, thus the
arrangement is regarded as finance lease. This directive came late in the year
for us to be able to reverse the way we managed these assets since the
inception of this PPP contract. However we have put in place corrective
measures in close collaboration with the AG's office and National Treasury.
The DoL has established a special project with Senior Managers dedicated to
address audit queries such that we avoid recurrence of these in future. Travel
and subsistence expenditure is reconciled monthly in the DoL. The only problem
which led to this matter appearing on AG's report is that no documentation was
readily available at Head Office, where the audit took place, as these were in
the provincial offices. Currently a dedicated team has been put in place to
ensure that this does not occur again.
Subsidised vehicles are closely monitored with log books and trip
authorities to ensure adherence to the Treasury regulations and other standing
prescripts. The challenge faced by the DoL is that of maintaining 70:30 ratio
of official: private use of the vehicle. Officials are expected to use
subsidised vehicles along the ratio stated above and in practice this tends to
be the reverse ratio whereby officials use 70% kilometres on what is regarded
as private use i.e. driving between home and workplace.
This is caused by the long distance they drive between home and work. In
provinces with high industrial density, for example, inspectors cover a huge
volume of their work with few kilometres of driving and spend more kilometres
between home and workplace. We have approached the national Department of
Transport which is the custodian of the guiding prescripts in this regard.
There is collaboration emerging in the process of searching for a solution
to this matter. Policy to write off irrecoverable loans has since been
developed. It must however be stated that the Legal Services Section of the
Department has all along been instrumental in giving guidance on write offs
even before this policy came into writing.
Staff turnover is a challenge in the DoL partly prompted by the fact that
the Department dedicates a fair amount of resources to the development of its
staff. They are poached by Private Sector e.g. inspectors, they get transfers
to other departments often to much higher levels.
We entered into partnership with targeted universities to train our staff.
We have the 'Attraction and Retention Strategy' whose aim is to ensure that we
develop internal talent and thereafter place staff in senior positions within
DoL.
This has led to promotions but the downside of this is that of budget under
expenditure resulting from the fact that sometimes such internal promotions
only need just a top up to the current salary range of the staff member. These
promotions lead to vacancies below and the process of filling vacancies remains
continuous. Good results of this venture led to the crisis of success.
To contain the vacancy rate DoL embarked on a campaign in 2005 which brought
vacancy rate down from more than 13% to 5,7%.
In conclusion, like any audit report, the AG's report focuses on those
issues which need correction. There is more good work done by the DoL.
Comparatively speaking a department that manages staff of between 7 000 and 8
000 as we do cannot have the same magnitude of challenges as a department of
300 staff. The DoL has this number of staff deployed in 129 Labour centres
countrywide, all controlled centrally at Head Office.
Some of the challenges highlighted in the Auditor-General's report have
begun to be addressed by the innovations we referred to above, like Project
ABC. We remain highly optimistic that the rigorous scrutiny we are subjected to
now can only help make us a better team, able to deliver beyond
expectations.
Thank you.
Enquiries:
Mokgadi Pela
Cell: 082 808 2168
Issued by: Department of Labour
19 October 2006
