The Democratic Alliance (DA) on Tuesday urged Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to establish a special task team to investigate the ”complete breakdown” of financial and operational management in the Limpopo health department.
This was evidenced by the Auditor General having issued the department with a 21-page qualified audit report for 2005/06, the party said in a statement.
It said the Auditor General found significant problems with the control of assets. For example, none of the hospitals visited had proper asset registers, and none had conducted stock counts or could even say when last a stock count had been conducted.
Control over departmental vehicles was also chaotic. Petrol cards that had been reported lost or stolen were in use, and sensors in cars were malfunctioning, resulting in odometer readings sometimes moving backwards. Vehicle accidents were also routinely unreported, the DA said.
”Many examples of suspicious processes in the purchase of goods and equipment had also been found, including bids to supply goods and services [that] were only accepted from historically disadvantaged individuals, which led to ‘extremely inflated’ prices, because no attempt was made to establish whether prices tendered were market-related.”
In some cases, goods and services were purchased from businesses belonging to departmental employees, but these vested interests were not mentioned anywhere and no approval had been obtained.
Some cases were found where the highest quotation was accepted for no good reason, and the department was unable to supply a list of all tenders awarded or of all tenders where the best-qualified applicant was not accepted.
The Auditor General had also identified many problems with the HIV/Aids programme, and in particular enormous deviations from the approved business plan.
For example, no training on post-exposure prophylaxis had taken place, no research had been conducted into the low uptake of nevirapine, and the department distributed only 35 000 of the 400 000 tins of baby formula it should have distributed, the DA said. — Sapa