Presenting her maiden budget speech for Provincial Treasury amounting to R573,8 million, the MEC for Finance, Ms Kenetswe Mosenogi stated that the 2024/25 budget aims to invest in critical areas that cut across all the departmental core programmes to enable the department to play critical role in fostering a thriving province where businesses can flourish.
Outlining key focus areas for the current financial year, MEC Mosenogi decried persistent late payment to suppliers saying this is concerning since it does not only lead to cashflow problems for emerging suppliers, but also results in reputational damage for the province.
“This non-compliance can potentially lead to costly litigations including fruitless and wasteful expenditure as suppliers transfer the non-payment cost to the state in the form of interest. Provincial Treasury will continue to impress upon Heads of Departments (HoDs) to adhere to the thirty-day payment regulation,” she said.
She told legislature that the department, through the Provincial Supply Chain Management (SCM) Unit, will also implement wide ranging measures such as analysis of commonly procured commodities in order to consider facilitating transversal contracts to minimise procurement risks, continuous updating of the North West Provincial Government SCM Policy Framework to ensure it conforms with the new changes in the SCM environment, Introduce modern technology platform in keeping with the fourth Industrial revolution and Internet of Things (IoT) to drive e-procurement solutions, training of SCM practitioners to avoid non-compliance which largely results in instances of irregular expenditure, continued capacitation, transversal contracting, and focused institutional support of specific departments and entities to improve compliance and audit outcomes; and continuation with outreach programmes to capacitate suppliers, including assisting emerging SMME’s with the necessary capacitation workshops including CSD registrations and support.
She further added that Provincial Treasury will intensify its efforts in supporting and capacitating departments and public entities to obtain more clean audits to at least three to four departments and for Public Entities respectively. This target for clean audit will progressively be increased over the medium term.
“Monitoring of Post Audit Actions Plans (PAAP) will be the central to eliminating audit findings that were not adequately addressed in the previous year. The review of Interim Financial Statements as well as providing feedback to Heads of Departments and Chief Financial Officers will be done meticulously to improve on the quality of the Annual Financial Statements that are submitted to the Auditor General,” she explained.
Continuous support to NTI Group with preparation of Annual Financial Statements to facilitate submission to the Auditor General as well as clearing the backlog will be given.
The Provincial Treasury will conduct a financial viability assessment of financially distressed entities and develop specific initiatives to improve their financial health. Over and above this, the province will be commencing engagements with all stakeholders for the development and introduction of a standardized financial system that will be utilized by all municipalities in the province.
“The system is intended to be a transversal system that will be used for reporting by all municipalities. This will enable the Provincial Treasury to monitor performance of municipalities on financial management issues with the view of having continuous improvement in that space. This will empower the province to be able to enhance its oversight responsibility within municipalities, “added MEC Mosenogi.
END.
Issued by Provincial Treasury’s communications unit
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