By Simon Nare
The parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts has been briefed on the systemic failures within the National Lottery Commission (NLC), which facilitated widespread corruption and irregular expenditure, effectively creating a free-for-all environment.
Speaking before the committee on Tuesday, NLC commissioner Jodi Scholtz highlighted severe shortcomings in the system, including rampant dereliction of duty among employees, a lack of accountability, and inadequate management.
During the NLC’s appearance to brief Parliament on its audit outcomes, Scholtz revealed that the commission had to overhaul its accounting policy.
Additionally, the chief finance officer and her team undertook a comprehensive review of all grant transactions to ensure alignment and compliance.
“We mapped all the processes; we have introduced the new system for grants. This had a lot of programming interfaces. We have separated this into a module approach to make it easier to engage with the NLC,” she said.
“In terms of the people we have had to revise our operating module and our structure to address some of these deficiencies. We also had to capacitate our evaluating unit.”
She told the committee that in terms of irregular expenditure, there was just blatant circumventing of controls and procurement was also decentralized and policy processes not aligned to legislation.
In other instances, it was incompetency and lack of training provided, lack of oversight and poor document management, expired contracts still honoured, and delegation of authority not followed.
“So, we have had to implement a lot of recommendation from these reports that had been previously done, cancellation of irregular contracts except for critical services. We had to go out to market again in those services making sure we got a standardized set of documents and quality assurance checklist put in place.
“We have also put in place a very focused demand plan, anything that is not in the demand plan I need to approve on. And so, we have been able to clear the previous years qualifications of irregular expenditure. We been able to engage external stakeholders to assist us in serving a number of structures,” she said.
These included the evaluation and adjudication of the critical tenders that the commission needed. She added that the commission has also been able to establish a committee that looked into all the irregular expenditure which would then decide whether further investigation was required.
The commissioner said the institution was currently looking into specifications for a new enterprise planning system for both finance and human capital management. She said this was critical because currently the commission was using a manual system, and they need to migrate to a digital system.
She told the committee that the commission had been able to fill quite a number of key vacancies and in some areas a skill audit had to be conducted, and it was found that there was no adequate technical skill.
The commission relied on service providers to help in that regard and those people had to be put on training to capacitate them.
In terms of irregular expenditure, Scholtz said the commission recorded 251 transactions amounting to R615 million. She said documents submitted to treasury revealed that in 2024 it amounted to R107 million and a further R416 million had been recommended for condemnation in 2025 and R2.8 of that R615 million was recommended for further investigation.
She said the exposure of these irregular expenditure was done with the assistance of people from outside.
“It has taken us a long time and that is primarily due to the volume of the transactions. Our current irregular expenditure is sitting at R4.4 million and this is subject to review by the Auditor-General. So, a lot of work has gone into making sure that our irregular expenditure is brought down,” she said.
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