Gauteng Finance MEC Mandla Nkomfe plans to stamp out fraud at every level in the province.
The Gauteng provincial treasury has walked a bit of a circuitous route, but is once again firmly back in familiar territory after being re-established as a separate and autonomous body outside of the province's finance department.
In June 2009, the decision was taken to amalgamate the Gauteng treasury, Gauteng shared services centre and the Gauteng fund into a newly constituted Gauteng department of finance.
"It became clear that we had to go back to treasury as a separate department because its existence is stipulated in the Public Finance Management Act," said Gauteng finance MEC Mandla Nkomfe. "If it is within the department of finance, it cannot play the supervisory role as treasury and so now only has to deal with the issues of resources, not service delivery."
The separation of roles enables the treasury to not only manage the province's budget and finances, through the position of a provincial accountant-general, but also to assume the forensics role that was previously the responsibility of the shared services centre.
"The treasury's responsibility is basically to look at the compilation of the budget, and to ensure that the financial resources of the province are managed in a prudent, efficient and effective way," said Nkomfe.
This includes helping the province's departments manage their own finances.
The Gauteng treasury was re-established at the beginning of April this year and has been making steady headway in meeting its mandate and regulatory requirements. Nkomfe said a recent delegation from the department of public service and administration had visited the treasury to ensure that the necessary structures and processed were in place. "It's all systems go now," he said.
Nkomfe said that although Gauteng has the second largest budget it has the smallest treasury, which places tremendous pressure on its officials to effectively carry out their duties. Measures have been put in place to improve ​ capacity and capability within the treasury, including sending delegations abroad to assess and learn from counterparts in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
The department has an annual budget of about R400-million that it has to manage, with Nomfundo Tshabalala appointed to head of department — essentially its chief executive.
She said the restructuring of her department was also a move to improve the capacity and capabilities of the treasury, particularly around the area of supply chain management, which has been identified as a weak point in the system.
"The treasury has to make sure it has appropriate capacity to pro-actively manage the supply chain process. This calls for us to be more proactive than reactive," she said. "That is why we are having this conference so we can train our people, and not only partner with public sector stakeholders, but also partner with the private sector that will enable us to put in place systems that will ensure government does not lose any money or resources through fraud and corruption."
She said that Gauteng is faring quite well in the fight against fraud and corruption compared to its provincial counterparts, largely as a result of the advanced financial systems it uses to issue and track payments.
"Fraud is a challenge across the country. We cannot yet say we are the best, but we are working very hard to ensure that there is zero tolerance if fraud occurs.
"Within our own internal provincial processes, if individuals are found guilty of corrupt practices, they are fired and disciplined in cases where we can."
Nkomfe earlier this year committed the province to rooting out fraud and corruption when he launched the province's strategy to tighten its supply chain processes, which includes having the state security agency vet all officials in the province.
This new supply chain strategy has already been rolled out within his own department, the treasury and the department of health. The programme will also oversee the allocation of funds to municipalities in the province to improve performance.
"We will strengthen the system of inter-governmental fiscal relations, with specific reference to the interface between planning, budgeting and transferring of funds, as well as resolving debt owed between organs of state," he said when announcing the new measures.
His department is also training 70 officials in advanced investigation techniques in a bid to improve capacity and handle the backlog of cases reported to the national anti-corruption hotline. In the first half of this year, 42 cases of alleged fraud and corruption in Gauteng were reported to this hotline. Nkomfe said in a media statement at the International Fraud Awareness Week conference in Midrand that he wanted to see action taken against individuals found guilty of such offences.
"Our view is that this will send a strong message that fraud and corruption will not be tolerated under any circumstances, no matter the status or position of the person involved. As we have said before, we must be aggressive and go after those who operate with impunity and pillage the resources of the state," he said.
Demonstrating the will and ability to crack down on guilty parties, he listed recent actions taken against offenders. These included the dismissal of a finance official in the department of agriculture and rural development for making duplicate payments to a supplier, the black-listing of a service provider to the department of finance for tender irregularities, the arrest and dismissal of a department practitioner for identity theft, and similar actions against a department's human resources official for benefiting from creating "ghost teachers".
He said that in addition to the punitive and control measures put in place, the fight against fraud and corruption relied heavily on awareness and education programmes to ensure that government employees understood the consequences.
"As a province, via the premier's office, we have also trained 24 ethics officers across the provincial government. It is necessary to have education, but not just in the boardrooms; it should be prevalent everywhere, But, of course, action is very important, and if there is an instance of fraud and corruption you have to pounce," he said.