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State attorney blasted for inefficiencies, losing money

Cape Town - The state is currently losing seven out of 10 court cases due to inefficiencies in the Office of the State Attorney, which results in substantial financial losses to government, a report done by the Public Service Commission shows.

The Public Service Commission, mandated to monitor and evaluate the organisation and administration and the personnel procedures in the public service, decided to conduct an investigation into the functioning of the Office of the State Attorney, following public concern about the fruitless and wasteful expenditure and the frequency of unsuccessful litigation.

The report quotes from a ruling made by Judge Eberhard Bertelsmann in 2014 when he criticised the Office of the State Attorney for gross dereliction of duty. “The present condition of this Office causes significant unnecessary expenditure of public funds that are wasted by cost orders granted against organs of state because of the poor quality of professional service provided by these officers of the court,” he said at the time.

A report by the auditor-general further found that poor checking and control measures led to fruitless expenditure of more than R30m by the Office.

According to the report, it was evident from the “limited information” obtained that legal costs in some departments were “substantial”.

For example, the department of health indicated that it spent a total of R20 464 585 on cases settled over two financial years, while the department of international relations paid close to R930 000 for legal briefs provided to counsel over three financial years. In addition, the South African Police Service’s litigation and administration department spent more than R323m on cases that were decided against it over three financial years.

Some of the main reasons for the malfunctioning of the Office of the State Attorney were a lack of cooperation from state departments, coupled with a lack of a sense of urgency.

Fin24 previously reported that the department of energy has been delaying a court case with Earthlife SA and the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute by not submitting answering affidavits.

In a different matter, the department of mineral resources wasted close to R700 000 in taxpayers’ money because it failed to follow up on a court case.

In the report the public service commission acknowledged that there were capacity constraints and high turnover and burnout of staff affect in the Office of the State Attorney, which affected its quality of work.

The PSC suggested that the manner in which cases were allocated to attorneys at the Office should be properly managed and a fair distribution of work should be addressed to ensure that attorneys manage their time effectively and prevent situations where default judgments are handed against the Office.
In reaction to the report, Glynnis Breytenbach, the DA’s shadow minister of justice, said the party would interrogate what appears to be serious abuse of court processes and public funds for frivolous litigation.

“This sort of frivolous litigation is something that we have seen play out in our courts time and time again,” Breytenbach said. “Most notably is President Jacob Zuma’s defence of the Nkandla matter which ended in concession on the steps of the Constitutional Court with a massive team of five advocates for the president alone.”

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