Senior metro officials face lifestyle audits to weed out crooks

It states Gungubele, who delivered his state of the city address on Tuesday, said routine oversight had uncovered significant levels of fraud and corruption, which had now prompted an anticorruption strategy that would see, among other solutions, senior officials subjected to lifestyle audits. The city would also overhaul its performance system to reduce the potentially arbitrary power of top officials to evaluate how well their departments functioned, he said. The metro was now financially stable, having received its fourth unqualified audit report for the 2011/12 financial year, with a clean opinion on financial statements for the first time. Last week, notes a Moneyweb report, Auditor-General Terence Nombembe reported that only 117 of the 536 audited entities for the 2011-12 National and Provincial Audit report received clean audits. Full BDlive report Full Moneyweb report

The picture is not so rosy in provincial departments and entities which lost R24.8bn to unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful spending. A City Press report says that's what Nombembe and his team found during their 2011/12 audit - and it's almost R4bn more than the previous review. The AG has warned this misuse of public funds has 'become the norm'. The biggest provincial offenders were the North West government, with R4.165bn; KZN, which incurred R3.993bn; and Free State, with R3.255bn. A report on the Moneyweb site says more than 400 schools could have been built with the R24.8bn, according to the SA Institute of Race Relations. It goes on to list a number of ways in which the money could have been spent, including educated 2.5m public school pupils for a year and paying for 1.2m university student places, 1.3 times the current number of students enrolled in public universities, according to the report. Full City Press report Full report on the Moneyweb site