Audit nothing remarkable
The debtor book stood at 8.6bn. About 68% of that was irrecoverable
TSHWANE: The Tshwane municipality has poured scorn on the ANC’s celebration of the latest unqualified auditor-general’s opinion on the capital city, saying the financial situation is nothing to write home about.
At a press briefing last week, the previous Tshwane mayor and ANC Greater Tshwane regional chairperson, Kgosientso Ramokgopa, welcomed the “the auditor-general’s sixth unqualified audit opinion that audit report relates to the administration of the ANC from July 2015 to June 2016. The audit confirmed that indeed you can place reliance on the financial assertions in financial statements of the city and, in fact, they did not find any irregularities,” said Ramokgopa.
“This is significant because it goes against the face and the claim of what the DA- and EFFled administration has been saying.”
The Tshwane MEC for finance, Mare-Lise Fourie, said the annual report served in council at the end of January issued an unqualified opinion.
“But an unqualified opinion by the auditor-general simply means the statements that were presented to the auditor-general represent fairly the financial position of the municipality,” she said.
‘‘In other words, the accounting entries were done correctly – the debits and the credits.
“What is interesting is that the ANC in the council (the previous administration of Tshwane) cheered when the unqualified audit report was presented to them, but not understanding the financial implications of what those financial statements represent. In the audit opinion, there are four issues highlighted by the auditor-general as being of concern. So it is an unqualified audit opinion with emphasis of matter,” Fourie said.
She said the auditor-general expressed concern over the significant uncertainties in terms of legal matters that the city was entangled in.
“As far as debtors are concerned, the debtor book at the end of the financial year stood at a whopping R8.6 billion. Of that R8.6 billion, the auditor-general estimated that approximately 68% of that debt was irrecoverable.
“We are now looking at plans… to clean up the debtor book,” said Fourie.
“The last item that was listed as emphasis of matter was the extremely high distribution loss in electricity. We lost R1.3 billion of electricity that was purchased for distribution.”
She said the operating account of the Tshwane municipality showed a significant deficit of R2.1 billion in the previous year’s auditor-general report.
“Now that’s a massive amount of money. Revenue that was collected, that was overspent. Of particular concern is the unauthorised expenditure that has been reported in the financial statements. The unauthorised expenditure totalled more than R2 billion,” she said.
She said the new DA government, led by mayor Solly Msimanga, had introduced a turnaround strategy where the availability of funds was limited for departments to a quarterly basis, in an attempt to curtail the scourge of unauthorised expenditure.
Fourie said Tshwane was also being haunted by an irregular expenditure bill of almost R2 billion – with about R400 million accumulated in the previous financial year.