Sue Blaine
29 August 2008
Johannesburg — THE labour department had taken steps to rectify an administrative deficiency that, for the 2007-08 financial year, led to a qualified audit from Auditor-General Terence Nombembe, the department's acting director-general, Les Kettledas, said yesterday.
Nombembe's report was tabled in the department's annual report to Parliament yesterday and would be publicly available within the next few days, Kettledas said.
There were two main reasons for Nombembe's qualification: shortcomings in the management and control of assets and the department's asset register, plus a lack of completeness in the department's reporting on multiyear training contracts -- funded through the National Skills Fund (NSF).
An offshoot was a reconciliation discrepancy of R10,7m in travel and meal allowances paid to NSF-funded trainees, Kettledas said.
This weekend, the department would advertise a number of posts aimed at strengthening its asset management capacity, so that the shortcomings Nombembe highlighted in the department's asset management systems could be improved, Kettledas said.
In Nombembe's 2006-07 report, that aspect of department administration also received a qualified audit and when the department endeavoured in the past year to ensure all its assets were properly accounted for, it transpired that some assets had duplicate barcodes - which meant they were counted twice, or that they were registered at values that did not match their real worth, he said.
"For example, in Limpopo we found on the register a condom dispenser listed at a value of more than R500000, while in the Eastern Cape, that same item was valued at R6500," Kettledas said.
There was no evidence of fraud, however, and Kettledas put this type of discrepancy down to a lack of training. Staff had subsequently been trained, he said.
The department i s implem-enting a financial management system allowing it to prepare its NSF statements on an accrual basis, instead of the current cash accounting-based system.
That would enable it to show auditors how much of the contract work had been completed within a given year and to what extent contractors still owed the department, said Kettledas.
Poor reconciliation of the R10,7m paid to trainees, whose training was funded by the NSF and who were paid meal and travel allowances so that they could attend the full course, le d to Nombembe's second qualification with regard to the NSF, which Kettledas pledged would also be rectified.
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