The City of Tshwane wants to prevent unnecessary legal action and save millions of rands in legal expenses through a new audit action plan with several other priority audit areas to identify weaknesses, prevent financial losses and uncover any potential fraud and corruption.
MMC for Corporate and Shared Services, Dana Wannenburg, said the plan that is yet to be implemented is part of their commitment to good governance and fiscal responsibility.
“This will be done in parallel with a renewed approach to risk management, so that the City can effectively identify and mitigate key risks that stand in the way of good governance and effective service delivery,” he said.
Loss controls, fleet, overtime and leave, and litigation management have been identified as the priority audit areas.
Wannenburg said the audit on loss controls will benefit our systems for managing and mitigating financial losses, including inventory and asset management.
On the other hand, the audit on fleet will analyse vehicle use and management, maintenance and repairs, fuel usage, budget allocation and cost-effectiveness.
“The audit on overtime and leave will build on existing investigations that have identified abuse and the need to tighten up our systems when it comes to granting overtime, sick leave and paid leave,” Wannenburg said.
The imminent plan will be put in place following the Auditor-General’s report on the City’s 2022/2023 financial year, which found that the municipality overstated the employees related costs by more than R415 million.
The AG report said: “Overtime payments stated at R618 335 286 and R615 944 148 were overstated by R413 652 014 due to employees being paid for more hours than worked.”
The report also found that close to R2m was paid towards salaries of employees who resigned from the municipality.
Part of the new audit plan will focus on litigation management, specifically on how legal cases and costs are managed.
The idea behind the exercise, according to Wannenburg, will be to evaluate current risk management strategies that can prevent future legal costs and losses.
“The audit will evaluate past and current legal case management and will support the new litigation management strategy that was recently approved, which aims to build internal legal capacity and systems to ensure effective litigation management, prevent unnecessary legal action and save the City millions in legal expenses,”he said.
He said the legal costs budget for 2024/25 is sitting at just over R100m, adding that there is a need “to focus on investing that in our own people and implementing digital case management systems that can drive efficiencies”.
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