Leading lady: The head of the Gauteng treasury department
The head of Gauteng's treasury, Nomfundo Tshabalala, has a tough task ahead of her as she leads the province's money manager into a new era that started in April this year when the department was re-established to enhance the role of overseeing the purse strings.
She is no stranger to the environment of public finance management, having cut her teeth in a number of government departments related to financial matters.
She has developed a strong reputation as a specialist in public finances, debt management and other methods of government development finance.
Drawing on this experience, her first order of business was to ensure that her department had the resources needed to fulfill her mandate.
"One of the critical things we have done in the province is to ensure the departments are capacitated in terms of human capital and not focusing on one individual being the chief financial officer, but also the support that person requires. We have also been very clear that they must be solely focused on the finances of that department," she said.
It has been common practice for these officials to also assume a host of non-core functions, such as taking responsibility for facilities and security management, for example.
This focus on the skills and capacity of personnel started in Tshabalala's own department, where she built sectoral or departmental competencies and specialists.
"As a treasury, we need to have capacity that will also understand the business of the various departments. If health's finances, for example, are challenged we must have appropriate capacity that understands why it is having difficulty and what measures can be put in place to address these challenged," she said.
"So that is the restructuring we have done to improve the way in which we run our business when we work with departments."
Such knowledge would span the entire scope of a department's operations, from staffing and training considerations through to the building of infrastructure and service delivery.
She said that advising and assisting is not her department's primary role, but that it falls within the scope of ensuring proper financial management accountability through intervening when the need arises. "It is not treasury's role to run a department; we can advise them as far as financial management is concerned and can provide support where we see a department has challenges, but our main role is to exercise oversight to evaluate, monitor and ensure the province maintains a sound fiscal position," she said.
An important tool used to introduce a degree of control, specifically in the area of procurement, is the application of computer systems such as SAP's enterprise resource planning solutions that are used mainly for the Gauteng government's procurement and payroll management.
"We believe this system is very good because it enables you to ensure that you do not raise an order when there are no resources and it enables us to quantify commitments so we do not over-commit available resources."
She said that Gauteng has made good progress in audit performance at both provincial and municipal level. "We have seen a lot of improvement as far as that is concerned, but obviously there are still some issues, such as the asset management we need to address and paying suppliers within 30 days, which has to be complied with."
On this latter issue, Tshabalala said gaps in the system or provision of the necessary documentation — order forms, receipt notes and invoices — are required to quickly and efficiently process payment. "We need to do away with instances where payments are delayed due to non-availability of the required paperwork."