THE City of Cape Town was the only metro in the country to receive a clean audit for the 2015/2016 financial year.
This was announced by Auditor-General Kimi Makwetu during a media briefing in Tshwane yesterday.
He said 49 out of 263 district municipalities received clean audits, which means their finances were properly presented in terms of accounting practice and in line with the law.
Makwetu said the Maluti-A-Phofung and Matjhabeng local municipalities in the Free State, Mogalakwena in Limpopo and the Gamagara and Dikgatlong local municipalities in the Northern Cape had shown an improvement from the previous financial year’s audit. Mutale in Limpopo and Rustenburg in North West showed no improvement.
Makwetu said: “The provinces with the most clean audits were in the Western Cape with 80%, followed by KZN with 18% and the Eastern Cape with 16%.”
He said the Western Cape had seen an increase in clean audits from 73% in the previous financial year. Despite having a high number of clean audits compared to other provinces, KZN’s outcomes had dropped from the previous year.
He said although Gauteng continued to perform well, it was the only province where all of its municipalities received unqualified audit reports, which means there were issues with aspects of their financial reports, or that legislation was not followed.
He added that the Northern Cape, North West and Free State were the provinces with the poorest results.
He said a number of municipalities in these provinces didn’t provide enough documentation on which to base an audit opinion. Irregular expenditure had increased by just over 50% across the country to R16,8 billion.
