Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi has commended various provincial departments and entities for their clean audits.
On Sunday, Lesufi and other provincial leaders gathered at the Capital Hotel in Sandton to celebrate the achievements of various provincial departments and entities that secured clean audits for the 2023/2024 financial year.
This comes after the province reported that eight out of 15 provincial departments in Gauteng have received clean audits following the release of the Auditor-General’s report earlier in 2024.
According to the report, six provincial departments, including community safety, achieved clean audit status, while 14 entities also received clean audits, an increase from the previous financial year.
It was further reported that additionally, 11 departments and entities delivered unqualified financial reports.
Lesufi said this was an indication that the province was working hard towards rebuilding some of its departments and institutions.
“There has been a campaign to suggest that we are not responsible enough to manage the finances of our people. This can only be achieved through the political oversight of MECs, but most importantly, the support of the administrative heads who are HODs and accounting officers. We came this morning to appreciate your work,” he said.
Furthermore, Lesufi said the fact that no other department had a disclaimer meant that the province was slowly winning the war against wasteful and fruitless expenditure.
“We are proud that there’s no single department in our province that has a disclaimer. There’s no single department that has a qualified report; of all the departments generally we can say we got good reports… If you check those figures, it’s clear that we are indeed on an upward trajectory. I want to thank the agencies and departments that got clean audits,” he added.
Lesufi said all the MECs usually regularly sit and go through incomplete infrastructural programmes in order to be able to account for delays and other challenges.
“Once a month on a Sunday, we sit down and go through incomplete infrastructure. I was excited that the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) came here to look at incomplete infrastructure. They found us already in the process of dealing with these issues. They understood that we were attending to the problems.
“There is a school in Soshanguve that received 100% matric pass rate in 2015 or 2016, and we said let us reward this school by giving them an infrastructure lift, but we have disrupted that school because the infrastructure is incomplete and it has affected the academic performance of the school,” he said.
The Star