Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan has said that there will be a surge in irregular expenditure reported at state-owned enterprises, because in the past auditors failed to correctly identify it.
The minister was responding to questions in Parliament on Wednesday about the poor audit outcomes of state-owned enterprises over the past few years.
"The fact is, irregular expenditure was not fully disclosed in the past five years," Gordhan said. "Private audit companies were complicit in that audits did not identify the totality of irregular expenditure."
For this reason, the disclosure of irregular expenditure figures in future annual reports are expected to be much higher, as "detection mechanisms" are better than before, Gordhan explained.
"We must hold auditing firms to account for the sloppy job they did," he said.
Gordhan added that there was a serious "fightback" from forces on social media like Twitter and some Chapter 9 institutions who are trying to stop efforts to get to the root of corruption at entities.
He urged South Africans to support the "fightback against the fightback".