North West SCOPA lambasted HODs for lack of concrete strategies in dealing with irregular, unauthorized, fruitless and wasteful expenditure as per PFMA regulations
The North West Provincial Legislature’s Standing Committee on Provincial Public Accounts has lambasted the Heads of Provincial Departments (HODs) and the Chief Financial Officers for lack of concrete plans on dealing with officials who commit irregular, unauthorised, and fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
This came after the Standing Committee held a meeting with the Provincial HODs and CFOs to discover how they have been dealing with the irregular, unauthorized, and fruitless and wasteful expenditure in their respective departments; whether there is implementation of the consequence management and SCOPA Resolutions.
SCOPA Chairperson, Hon. Mahlakeng Mahlakeng said as the provincial departments’ irregular expenditure stands at R13, 2 billion from 31 March 2016, each Head of Department failed to provide a clear and probable strategy or plan in relation to how they can attend to it.
“Even those people who are charged on financial misconduct and cases reported to the South African Police Services they actually win them at the level of courts of law, which creates a challenge on how the departments would have been preparing themselves.
“The fruitless and wasteful expenditure also relates to bills and interest on invoices being paid late, such as Telkom; Eskom and municipalities and it creates a problem again as not even half of the money in relation to a particular department is recovered.
“Today, we stand at a fruitless and wasteful expenditure of R28 million and that money must be fully recovered or if not, we need to have specific reasons suggesting why it would not be recoverable,” said Hon. Mahlakeng.
He said the meeting was important as the Committee had to take up the issue of irregular, unauthorised and fruitless and wasteful expenditure with the HODs in relations to the Public Finance Management Act No 1 of 1999 and highlighted Section 38; 39; 40 and 42 which deals with their responsibilities which should be read with Section 81 and 84, that deals with disciplinary proceeds on financial misconduct by officials in the departments and what needs to happen on financial matters.
“In this particular period, it is definitely business unusual, meaning that if we are unsatisfied with their individual reports, we will take them up on those responsibilities as per PFMA regulations,” said Hon. Mahlakeng.
Amongst some of the departments, in the financial year 2014/15, which is the year under review, the Department of Education and Sports Development incurred an irregular expenditure of R131, 7 million and fruitless and wasteful expenditure of R408 000 and the Department of Health incurred an irregular expenditure of R763 834 million and fruitless and wasteful expenditure of R20,3 million.
The North West Provincial Government’s Director-General Dr. Lydia Sebego said the accounting officers in the provincial government are grateful that SCOPA has called them to account and promised to fully implement consequence management policies and ensure that the irregular, unauthorized, fruitless and wasteful expenditure is drastically reduced.
“In the coming weeks, we will be hosting workshops on consequence management with the accounting officers for them to understand and implement matters raised in the audit report. We also promise to send irregular, unauthorized, and fruitless and wasteful expenditure registers to the Public Accounts Committee in the next 14 days,” said Dr. Sebego.
Members of the Committee also instructed the HODs to implement recommendations of all forensic investigation reports in their respective departments. “The recent local government elections suggest that complacency is not something we must adhere to. Service delivery must be accelerated to the people. All HODs are qualified to do their jobs and must follow processes to the latter no matter how tedious they might find them to be,” said Hon. Mahlakeng.
Enquiries:
Namhla Luhabe
Cell: 079 527 0628
Email: namhla@nwpl.org.za
