The Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, has once again reiterated its position that no bonuses or performance rewards should be paid to staff in municipalities where there is no improvements in audit outcomes.
This emerged at a Local Government Municipal Finance conference held in Durban today. The Conference hosted by Cogta features Chief Financial Officers in municipalities, Accounting Officers and key private sector institution involve in the accounting and auditing disciplines.
The Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA) is playing a crucial role in ensuring that audit outcomes of the province’s municipalities improve steadily towards the ultimate objectives of Operation Clean Audit as it gathers the Chief Financial Officers from KwaZulu-Natal’s (KZN) 61 municipalities for a mini-conference on audits in Durban.
“Our hard work in KZN municipalities has, over time, translated into steady improvements in audits outcomes, measured not only by the seven clean audits for the 2012/13 financial year but a constantly decreasing number of audit queries from the Auditor-General,” said KZN MEC for COGTA Nomusa Dube-Ncube.
KZN COGTA’s support structure and monitoring of municipal finances ensures that municipalities are able to plan and budget with integrity, raise their own revenue and collect outstanding debt and expend their budgets to achieve the best possible service delivery outcomes on behalf of their ratepayers and indigent residents alike.
“Even as we offer our municipalities round-the-clock assistance with planning, budgeting and expenditure management, we are mindful of the fact that local government is a separate sphere of government with an independent constitutional mandate. We are not running municipalities, we are playing a supporting role,” said Dube-Ncube.
KZN COGTA often faces calls for direct interventions in municipalities and investigations into their day-to-day operations or protests against such interventions and investigations, both of which need to be considered carefully and on merit given the constitutional framework within which both local and provincial government operate.
“Deciding whether to intervene and what to investigate is always a balancing act. We need to work within our mandate and limited resources and we cannot duplicate functions that are already performed by municipalities themselves or supreme audit institutions such as the Auditor-General whose office pronounces on the regularity of municipal financial management,” said Dube-Ncube.
Under these circumstances, KZN COGTA finds the best approach to be one where municipalities are engaged with continuously on a one to one basis with regards to their specific needs and where prevention along with a system of checks and balances plays an important role in ensuring that crises in the way local government is managed do not break out.
For more information:
Lennox Mabaso, Spokesperson
Cell: 082 884 2403
