By Simon Nare
Parliament’s tourism portfolio committee has slammed the Tourism Department and South African Tourism (SAT) over persistent fruitless and wasteful expenditure and failures to address recurring audit findings.
The department and the entity appeared before the committee to account for findings by Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke, which revealed a stark contrast in their financial governance.
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The AG’s findings revealed that while the department successfully achieved a clean audit opinion, the entity regressed to a qualified audit opinion for consecutive financial years. MPs said this was unacceptable because recommendations were made and they were ignored.
Committee chairperson Ronalda Schivonne Nalumango said on Tuesday that numerous recommendations were made to SAT, the department and the SA Tourism board in the last financial year based on the audit findings of financial and non-financial performance.
Nalumango said the committee had also monitored implementation of the audit action plan, but was disappointed that the audit findings against both the department and the entity remained unchanged, with South African Tourism again receiving a negative audit outcome.
“The findings for SA Tourism remaining the same around poor financial statements being submitted to the Auditor-General is a repeat finding for the past three financial years. This is unacceptable.
“The clean audit obtained by the department cannot therefore be fully commended whilst SA Tourism which receives more than 50% of the budget remains in the doldrums,” she said.
The chairperson said that while progress has been made in addressing some findings, the late appointment of the CEO did not allow her to deal with all the findings.
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She reminded officials from both the department and the entity that throughout the financial year, the committee kept on calling for critical posts to be filled at SAT, but this fell on deaf ears.
“It is therefore no surprise that the entity is sitting with another qualified audit. The impact of this goes beyond governance issues at SA Tourism, but also means that the Tomsa Levies (Tourism Levy for South Africa) will be held by the Tourism Business Council of South Africa yet again,” she said.
Nalumango urged the chief financial officer to quickly attend to the issue of direct changes in the accumulated surplus, which she said was one of the issues that led to a negative audit outcome.
“This matter should be corrected in the financial statements moving forward to avoid recurring findings in the next financial year. It is a matter of serious concern that the Root Cause Audit Action Plan was not fully implemented,” she said.
The chairperson said implementation had been delayed by a slow response from the accounting authority to address audit findings, instability at SAT, and delays in implementing and handing over infrastructure projects by the department.
