Eastern Cape treasury shines with national clean audit award

The Eastern Cape treasury has been presented with a national clean audit award by the Chartered Institute of Government Finance Audit and Risk Officers General.

This comes after the province’s improved audit outcomes in municipalities for the 2015-16 financial year. In that year, the province had achieved seven clean audits in municipalities, coming third after the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.

The deputy director-general for municipal financial governance in the treasury, Bulelwa Nqadolo, said the improvement was due to a proactive approach by treasury in collaboration with Salga, the office of the premier and the department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs.

“A municipal intervention strategy was approved by the MEC in October 2015 where weaknesses identified by the auditor-general of SA were prioritised and classified under short-, medium- and long-term solutions,” she said.

“Municipalities were assisted in developing audit action plans to address weaknesses identified during the audit process.”

Nqadolo added that in 2015-16, her department employed several strategies to attend to concerns raised by the AG previously regarding poor financial performance by municipalities.

These included:

• Assessing municipal budgets and providing regular feedback;
• Monitoring the readiness of municipalities to submit quality financial statements through training;
• High-level reviews on the annual financial statements before the submission for audit and providing audit file checklists;
• Treasury taking part in meetings of municipal audit steering and audit committees;
• Monthly feedback to the municipalities to identify auditing red flags; and
• Improved revenue management, especially of indigent people, and improving ratepayers’ debt control by setting up committees dedicated to this task. — zingisam@dispatch.co.za