Nobody stole money from the municipality during the 2008/2009 financial year but there are officials who are not skilled at doing their work, Makana Municipality’s Chief Financial Officer Jackson Ngcelwane has said in response to a damning Auditor General’s (AG) report that slammed the municipality's record-keeping.

In an exclusive interview with Grocott's Mail, iNgcelwane said that extensive and proper training of officials is needed if the municipality is to attain a clean audit, and that the key solution to the municipality’s performance is to train officials on how the accounting system works.

“We need to prioritise compliance matters, bank reconciliations and leave records for the 2009/2010 financial year,” he said. “I should be allowed to hire a qualified accountant who is an expert on bank reconciliations at whatever cost required by him or her.”

He added that complying with legislation cannot be compromised or trivialised. The act of reconciling bank statements is to verify whether the amount of cash reported by the company's books is consistent with the amount of cash shown in the bank's records.

“The AG's report is one of measuring tools used by other institutions when assessing the municipality’s performance,” he explained. “It means there’s something wrong with the municipality.” He added that if   a municipal employee applies for leave this should be captured in the leave management system immediately.

“What goes into financial statements is not just figures, auditors also judge us on legal compliance.”
According to Ngcelwane, the manner in which audits are carried out these days differs from the system which was used before 1994.

“These days municipalities are highly regulated, for example, we don’t only have to pay attention to the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) but also the Municipal Systems Act as well as the Division of Revenue Act.”

He also said because human resource capacity differs from one municipality to the other due to size, salaries also differ.

He said it is difficult for him to keep an accountant who specialises in bank reconciliations as such
skills are in high demand.

In order for the municipality to attain a clean audit municipal administrators and councillors should work together for compliance reasons.

He argued that the same issues that were raised by the AG during previous audits still haven't been cleared up.

The AG took a sample of transactions and noticed that the municipality did not claim VAT for some transactions, something which he said was later corrected.

“It's bullsh** to say we didn't claim VAT for the whole year - if that is so what are we doing here?”
He pointed out similar “mis-statements” and argued that some figures contained in the AG's report were estimated based on extrapolation but that the report did not indicate this.

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