DEPARTMENT’S AUDIT OPINION
Water affairs bid to fix finances ‘has collapsed’
Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu gives the water and sanitation department a qualified audit opinion, and warns recommended changes have been ignored
The Department of Water and Sanitation’s interventions aimed at cleaning up its shambolic financial state has fallen apart and is inadequate to pull it into a clean audit, says Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu. He gave the department a qualified audit opinion for its 2016-17 financial year. In the previous year it incurred the highest irregular as well as fruitless and wasteful expenditure finding of any department. In his 2015-16 audit report, Makwetu noted fruitless and wasteful expenditure of R87.2m and irregular expenditure amounting to R2.5bn. In defence, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane said legislation placed the burden of providing water services on the department but did not give it adequate authority for oversight on municipalities as stewards of water services. In his report for 2016-17, Makwetu said that despite budgeting and accounting for reclassified payments and transfers for subsidies, the flawed nature of transactions had not been changed and transfers t...
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