The National Assembly’s Portfolio Committee on Defence (PCOD) has rapped the Department of Defence for its sixth consecutive qualified audit from the Auditor General.
The Parliamentary Monitoring Groupreports that acting committee chairman Gerhard Koornhof last week commended the DoD for its “best ever” Annual Report from an oversight point of view but noted that “it was some cause for concern that the department had received a qualified audit from the Auditor General, for the sixth year running.
“Only a few other departments had a continuing history of qualified audits.”
Koornhof, according to the minutes, added there had been a commitment to eliminating this.
He added that the committee would “interact with the department” on the issue – in addition to any work of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) on the same issue.
Meanwhile, fellow ANC MP Pamela Daniels noted that the Annual Report noted that the President had signed the Prohibition of Mercenary Activity and Prohibition and Regulation of Certain Activities in an Area of Armed Conflict Act into law in December 2006, but it was not yet operational.
She asked why the regulations were so slow in coming as Parliament had processed the legislation with urgency.
DoD Chief Director for HR Policy Mary Ledwaba said the promulgation of regulations had been held up by the need to amend the National Conventional Arms Control Act (NCACA) “and that amendment had just passed through Parliament.”
Koornhof then asked when the regulations would be promulgated, seeing that the amendments no the NCACA had been passed by Parliament.
Ledwaba answered that she expected this to take a further six month. Acting defence secretary Tsepe Motumi qualified this to mean by the end of the financial year.
