The Auditor General’s report for the 2015/2016 financial year has revealed that all 12 provincial departments and entities have received unqualified audit status.
Gauteng Premier, David Makhura stated that the Gauteng departments have received their best performance in 13 years.
“This serves as an indication that the province is on track towards achieving its goal of establishing credible financial control systems and ultimately realising 100 per cent clean audits,” said Makhura.
He highlighted the improvement in financial spending at the Department of Health, which he attributed to the department putting in place a strategic intervention plan on all previous audit outcomes, in particular revenue management, to address the findings of the previous financial years and these plans were rolled out in all health institutions.
Makhura said the provincial government was pleased with the Department of Health’s performance, more so that this achievement took place during this administration’s fifth term of office.
“We also wish to applaud them on the significant improvement of their finances and for providing public healthcare service delivery across the Gauteng City Region.
Our decisive interventions to address challenges at G-Fleet, the agency of the Gauteng Department of Roads and Transport, led to this public entity moving from a disclaimer last year to achieving an unqualified audit status in this audit cycle,” said Makhura.
He said the province was encouraged by the improvements that were noted in the report.
“We wish to commend all departments for the hard work that has gone into achieving this milestone. These audit outcomes show that we have done a lot since 2014 to move towards a clean government that is transparent and accountable to the people,” he said.
He further noted that the province would not rest until all departments and entities ultimately realised 100 per cent clean audits.
“We will continue to work closely with departments to ensure compliance with procurement rules and regulations, conduct extensive reviews of monthly, quarterly and annual financial statements, address recurring audit findings and provide targeted financial reporting as part of a broader intervention to eliminate material amendments to the annual financial statements.”
A clean audit is achieved if the financial statements of the auditees are free of material errors or omissions (financially unqualified audit opinion).
Financially unqualified with findings is when the financial statements are unqualified (clean) but findings have been raised on predetermined objectives and/or compliance with laws and regulations.
A qualified audit opinion is when the financial statements contain material misstatements in specific figures or there is insufficient evidence for the auditor to conclude that specific (identified) figures included in the financial statements are not materially overstated or understated.
Read: ANC congratulates Gauteng government on clean audits
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