Tempers flared in the standing committee on public accounts yesterday as Shauket Fakie, the auditor-general, and Tami Sokuto, the outgoing director-general of the department of public works, and his top management team clashed over an adverse audit report.

Fakie said afterwards that the department's attack on the quality of work done by his office was tantamount to "shooting the messenger".

He stood by the accuracy of the report, which highlighted long-standing management problems in the department, mainly relating to the difficulty of getting documentary proof to back up figures in its books.

"We do not have any agenda to discredit the department or give an impression that there is chaos in the department," he said. "We just report factually the way we find it."

The audit report covered the financial year to March 2001. In it Fakie said that because of numerous irregularities - such as the late submission of financial statements, the late settlement of debts, failure to recover from other government departments R59.7 million in rents that would now have to be written off, problems with the asset register, mis-allocated personnel expenditure and alleged fraud by about 11 officials - he could not express an opinion on the department's financial statements.

But Sokutu and his officials insisted that much had changed since 2001, and the main problem was that Fakie's teams had "not understood" how the department's management systems worked. They had asked for the wrong documents and had angered staff by making "factually incorrect" findings.

"We have made tremendous improvements in terms of the control within our financial environment," Sokutu said.

The department, which had been widely criticised for not delivering on the management of state property and the community public works programme, "is now spending its full budget instead of having rollovers every year", he said.

Sokutu, who is due to join African Bank Investments Limited at the end of the month as chief operating officer and managing director-designate, believed the department should be run as a commercial entity.

"To apply State Tender Board regulations (another area in which Fakie had found that the department was not sticking to the rules) to it does not help it," he said.

Fakie stuck to his guns, however, saying: "When they accept they have a problem, they shoot the messenger ... There is absolutely nothing factually in our report that ca be challenged."

He particularly objected to the fact that the department said it was his staff's fault that supporting documents were not sent in quickly: "It is not my duty as an external auditor to go and look for the documents."

With acknowledgements to Lynda Loxton and Business Report.