There's been little improvement in the financial health of municipalities, AG tells MPs

CAPE TOWN - The management of the country’s municipalities is going backward. 

Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke said that even metros were not showing any significant improvement in managing their finances despite having more resources and skills. 

Presenting the 2022/23 audit outcomes to Parliament on Tuesday, Maluleke said that the majority of municipalities that had received unqualified audits made little effort to move out of this category. 

This audit outcome is the first full year under the administration elected in the 2021 local government elections. 

But Maluleke said that overall, there’d been no meaningful improvement in the financial health of municipalities. 

"They are unable to report faithfully on service delivery issues and they are also unable to procure in a manner that’s consistent with the law and often, that leads to tremendous leakage."

Of the 257 municipalities, only 34 obtained clean audits. 

While 45 municipalities have improved their audit outcomes since 20/21, the last year under the previous administration, 36 have regressed. 

Seventy-seven of the 110 municipalities with unqualified audits with findings have been in this category since the previous administration. 

"Municipalities celebrate when they have an unqualified audit opinion but what gets left behind is the pitfalls of running a municipality that remains too comfortable in that unqualified space."

Maluleke said that almost half of municipal performance reports contained information that was neither useful nor reliable in assessing performance.