Cape Town - Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke has confirmed that if there is corruption in funds for flood relief measures in KwaZulu-Natal she will refer the cases to the Hawks, the National Prosecuting Authority and the Special Investigating Unit for criminal prosecution.
She said they wanted to create strong controls to prevent any corruption in procurement and use of funds for relief in the province.
But if they find corruption and malfeasance, they will not hesitate to refer the cases to the law enforcement agencies.
She said when they started auditing Covid-19 PPE funds in April and May 2020, by June there was a report on this and by December of that year there were already people in the dock charged with fraud and corruption.
She said they have powers to refer corruption cases to the Hawks, the NPA and the SIU.
They have been working together at the Fusion Centre for the last two years.
“The powers of referral do allow us to refer matters to the Hawks, the SIU, the NPA, the Financial Intelligence Centre and a number of other public bodies. When we did Covid-19 audits what worked well was to share insight, our information, our findings, our analysis on databases with those bodies and to give them the opportunity to then act on them.
“What we have seen on the work we did then, people who tried to defraud Sassa were held accountable pretty much quickly, within months of us doing this work. We did this work in April and May and the report on it in June. By the time we all went away on holiday (in December) there were people in the dock in relation to Sassa and UIF Ters scheme,” said Maluleke.
“What that tells you is that we can continue to find ways of deepening our relationships with these public bodies and refer matters as the law allows us to do so. We will do this as part of this audit work now. We will implement those powers and give effects to the standing arrangement we have with those public bodies,” she said.
Maluleke said she would complement the team that is already in KZN with a number of specialists from Pretoria.
The specialists will be from Information Systems Management, experts in forensics and fraud detection, engineers and quantity surveyors.
siyabonga.mkhwanazi@inl.co.za
Political Bureau