Auditor General applaud SALGA for assisting municipalities improve their audit outcomes

Posted: 01 June 2016

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Presenting the 2014/2015 municipal audit outcomes on Wednesday, 01 June, Auditor General Kimi says compared to the start of the term of the current crop of councillors in 2011, there had been an encouraging improvement in municipal audit outcomes over the past five years.

He said whereas many municipalities had been deemed to be in a hopeless position five years ago in terms of audit outcomes, now the number of clean audits had improved from 13 to 54 out of 278 municipalities, while the number of disclaimers had decreased, from 84 to 29.

“We would like to recognise the considerable effort that has been put into this by SALGA, the National Treasury, as well as the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, in addressing the root causes of the disclaimers, he said.

The AG says SALGA has made a special effort to help municipalities in the “red zone”.

Overall audit outcomes

Local government consists of 278 municipalities and 52 municipal entities. The audit outcomes of the municipalities are analysed in sections 2 to 5 and those of municipal entities are summarised in section 6.
We set the cut-off date for inclusion of the audit outcomes in this report as 31

January 2016. By this date:

• the financial statements of Phumelela (Free State) were still outstanding
• the audits of Dikgatlong (Northern Cape), Ikwezi (Eastern Cape), Ngwathe (Free State) and Renosterberg (Northern Cape) were still being performed, as the financial statements had not been received by the legislated submission date
• the audit of Bojanala district (North West) was still underway, although the financial statements had been received by the legislated date. Figure 1 reflects the audit outcomes of the 278 municipalities and table 1 analyses the movement in audit outcomes per type of municipality over five
  years.
  

Figure 1: Improvement in audit outcomes of municipalities