Consultants come under scrutiny

GOVERNMENT consultants have been warned to deliver the goods or face being penalised.

This after the country’s municipalities spent nearly R700 million on consultancy fees with no real improvement in their financial performance and audit outcomes.

Government consultants would also be vetted in future to prevent situations where they don’t improve a municipality’s financial standing due to incompetency, despite the huge amounts they get paid.

Addressing yesterday’s briefing on the Auditor-General’s local government audit results, Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Minister Pravin Gordhan said the use of consultants by municipalities would have watched more closely.

“Now you would expect that the so-called private sector people have the right skills so that they will come in and do the right thing… Well, we find that municipalities spend close to R700m hiring privatesector consultants in one form or another. That still results in some 80 percent of financial statements not being of the quality required by the Auditor-General,” Gordhan said.

“The government will ask tough questions about why these consultants get paid.

“What are they actually doing about municipalities? Why are they contributing to undermining municipal financial performance as opposed to actually assisting municipalities in this regard?”

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Gordhan said one of the things the national Treasury would look at with Cogta was the centralisation of procurement of financial management consultants “so that there’s vetting”.

“We have to ensure we have the right people with the right qualifications and competence. But if they also don’t perform on what they said they will perform, there’s some recourse to withholding fees and taking action against those consultants,” Gordhan said.

Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu said it was not about “chasing consultants away”.

“This is a relationship that is at arms-length with the municipality and needs to be project-managed carefully with the right service provider,” he said.