Compensation Fund under fire

Cape Town - On Wednesday the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) demanded the head of the commissioner of the Compensation Fund because of the successive qualified audits the institution has received in recent years.

The fund compensates workers injured on duty.

For the past four years the financial reporting of the fund, which experiences enormous fraud in its payments, has been such that the Auditor General (AG) is unable to do a proper audit.

The committee believes that the commissioner, Shadrack Mkhonto, should accept responsibility for the poor performance of the internal audit committee.

Scopa ANC member Roy Ainslie, in referring to the fund's turnaround strategy developed in 2007, said it was impossible for the committee to assess the strategy because the fund's board as well as its audit committee were not functioning.

Month after month, he declared, the audit committee had failed to do their job. Mkhonto should have ensured that the committee performed - and he had not done so.

Claims against the Compensation Fund had increased 35.6% in the previous financial year.

Jimmy Manyi, director general of the Department of Labour, also came under fire for the department's qualified audit, especially in terms of asset management.

It had come to light that the asset-management system that the department had introduced at national level in March 2008 was, two years later, still not being implemented in the provinces and no one had yet been appointed to manage it. In the previous financial year the AG had been unable to trace departmental assets to the value of R136m.

- Sake24.com

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