Care of Auditor-General Extends to Armscor Allegations [Business Report, 2005-05-17]

Publication	Business Report
Date	2005-05-17
Reporter	Renée Bonorchis
Web Link	www.busrep.co.za

One sometimes has to admire the tenacity of auditor-general Shauket Fakie and his staff.

In a report apparently released earlier this month but only circulated to the parliamentary press gallery as a whole yesterday, he examined in great and tediously technical detail eight of the 72 allegations made a few years ago by "an informant" that state arms manufacturer Armscor had had some rather suspect dealings with a certain supplier.

Fakie does not name the supplier, but it has been widely reported that it was African Defence Systems (ADS), one of the main beneficiaries of the still controversial multibillion-rand arms acquisition deal.

In this case, the contracts involved a wide range of technical and information technology-related equipment for Armscor which had either not been installed to specification, if at all, or had not worked as expected.

Fakie concluded that internal controls in Armscor had been "inadequate" and needed further investigation by the Armscor board and management.

The sums involved in the individual contracts are not huge, although they have been reported to total several millions of rands.

But any cent wasted is a cent worth chasing up for Fakie and his team, especially when painfully cobbled-together procedures in the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA), aimed at ensuring tighter financial controls in government have been so obviously flouted.

Record-keeping seems to have been particularly poor, equipment delivered simply did not work and a whole lot of double-invoicing had been going on at the time of all the alleged transgressions in the late 1990s.

One could welcome the fact that all this is now coming to light and hope that things have improved since then, but the mass of technical jargon and endless acronyms used make it difficult to judge how bad the effect of it all was.

Maybe the PFMA should also have stipulated that all technical gobbledy-gook should be translated into plain language so that Joe and Joan Public can understand what on earth is or was at stake.