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Parliament - The human settlements department has achieved its 17th consecutive unqualified audit report since 1994, MPs heard on Wednesday.
Director General Thabane Zulu said his department would seek to ensure that the matters raised by the Auditor General received attention.
This particularly applied to departmental performance management and reporting.
Zulu was briefing the National Assembly's human settlements committee on his department's 2010/11 annual report.
The annual report also revealed that almost 1000 government officials had been arrested for and about 871 convicted of offences related to the National Subsidy Programme.
"These are officials who corruptly benefited from the housing programme meant for the poor," he said.
The sentences handed down included suspended sentences and, with conditions, to repay subsidy amounts.
Of these, 1615 acknowledgements of debt to the value of R21.7m had been signed by civil servants who defrauded the department and or provinces.
The arrests resulted from the Special Investigating Unit's (SIU) work, as mandated by a Presidential Proclamation issued in the 2010/11 financial year.
Disciplinary processes were handled by the respective departments and municipalities, Zulu said.
Four hundred municipal employees had been arrested during the review period, with 334 court cases finalised.
To date, 860 acknowledgements of debt worth R8.2m had been signed by municipal employees who committed fraud in terms of the National Subsidy Programme.
"The department will vigorously pursue those who seek to defraud the state because such acts affect the poor and the people targeted by government housing delivery programme," Zulu said.
The Housing Development Agency had identified more than 33 000 hectares of state land for evaluation for release for human settlements development.
However, problems remained within the department, especially its capacity to monitor all human settlements projects in the country and provinces' failure to prioritise and budget for the resolution of blocked projects, he said.
