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A-G’s damning report reveals R26bn wasted

The Auditor-general has uncovered billions of rand in unauthorised, irregular and fruitless and wasteful expenditure during the audit of government books for the 2010/11 financial year. Auditor-General Terence Nombembe and his team identified R26.4 billion in such spending – up from R22.4bn in the previous year – which includes instances of tender processes being ignored or subverted, friends and family members of civil servants participating in government procurement, and a generally lax attitude to monitoring how taxes are spent. Irregular expenditure (R18.5bn) at national departments accounted for the lion’s share. Deputy Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu was presenting the A-G’s consolidated audit outcomes for national and provincial government to Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts yesterday.

A total of 34 percent of government departments awarded state contracts to “officials and their close family members” and 30 percent were found to have “inadequate contract management” in place. The latest public spending figures come exactly a week after the Special Investigating Unit told MPs that up to 20 percent – or between R25bn and R30bn – of the government’s procurement budget was lost as civil servants stuck their fingers in the till, overpaid for products and services, or simply failed to monitor how public money was spent. Auditors also expressed concern about the fact that three national departments and their provincial equivalents, which together account for about 70 percent of all state expenditure – Health, Education and Public Works – failed to achieve a single clean audit between them.

Source: iol.co.za

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A-G’s damning report reveals R26bn wasted

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