Deadline for new accounts system likely to be missed again

THE Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality will miss its third deadline to go live with its new financial accounting system.

Three years after the city undertook two ambitious projects to change the way it draws up its financial reports and to have one computer system linking all its departments, it is unclear when the systems will be up and running.

The two projects are mSCOA (Municipal Standard Chart of Accounts) – which is a national Treasury requirement for all municipalities to link up with the national government – and the Enterprise Management Solutions (EMS) which is a new internal municipal system.

To date, the metro has spent about R71-million on the two projects and they are yet to be fully operational.

It also forked out more than R20-million in bonuses last year to municipal staff who put in overtime working on implementing the mSCOA, to reach some of the milestones.

At a budget and treasury portfolio meeting on Thursday last week, city manager Johann Mettler revealed the municipality would not meet its June 30 deadline to go live with mSCOA.

The municipality was meant to go live with the system in July last year and then in December. Both deadlines were missed.

“The deadline for June 30 may not be realised and that is a result of a number of factors [such as] the changes in the versions of mSCOA since the start up to now,” Mettler said.

He said they had turned to the national Treasury for help.

“We engaged with the national Treasury [in March] and requested that it assist us with coming up with an approach that will allow us to have a conclusion.”

Previously, the Treasury threatened to withhold grant funding if the city was not mSCOA compliant.

Presenting the status of the city’s accounting system at the meeting, application systems specialist in the human resources department Phumeza Sume said the entire project was 95% complete.

Sume said the headache was loading the municipality’s data onto the new systems.

The municipality currently used more than 50 different systems.

The contract to implement mSCOA was awarded to Sebata in 2015 and expires in August.

EFF councillor Zilindile Vena described the plans to possibly extend the contract as a sign of a crisis.

“How long will it take for us to go live? I understand that we also have [municipal] employees working on this where serious money was paid,” Vena said.

“We have always maintained that we don’t want a situation similar to that of the IPTS [the metro’s public transport system] where we have a cash cow.

“Is there a will to make sure we go live as soon as possible. Seemingly there is a serious crisis here and we are trying to avoid this crisis. We want to assist.”

Portfolio head Retief Odendaal denied there was a crisis.

“Because this affects every department in the municipality we have to be vigilant, but there is no crisis here,” he said.

“When [Cape Town] embarked on their EMS system it ended up costing over R1-billion and took years to get a solution that fulfilled all their different systems.”