Patricia de Lille says department’s failure to migrate to IT systems leads to corruption

Cape Town - Public Works and Infrastructure Minister Patricia de Lille says the main obstacle to her oversight role was the department’s resistance to using information technology systems, preferring instead to continue working manually.

This, she said, enabled corruption to occur within the department.

De Lille, acting director-general Imtiaz Fazel and Chief Financial Officer, Lesetja Toona, appeared before Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) to explain the irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure within the Property Management Trading Entity (PMTE).

The minister referred to the entity as having become a “banking account in overdraft”, which had resulted in disputes around leases worth R4.5 billion.

Unresolved irregular expenditure within the entity amounted to R1.5b while fruitless and wasteful expenditure stood s at just over R132 million.

“We have a lot of overpayments and underpayments in the department. We have now gotten to the bottom of what is causing the overpayments… who is pressing that button to overpay on a monthly basis.

“In terms of the delegations for the people who are pressing the buttons - doing the constant over expenditure - I discussed with the acting DG that the way we are going to stop this is to remove the delegations from those people who must pay,” De Lille said.

She told the committee that to date, the PMTE was not fully compliant with the prescripts of National Treasury as six conditions were put forward for the entity to exist, but only two conditions were met. “Seventy six percent of our budget is spent by PMTE - we are working hard to change this around. I’ll be giving the AG a report on 4 March to give an idea on what we have done to stop the rot of the PMTE - it is just clear corruption.

“A lot of the leases over the years have been handed over to the SIU. The SIU has had a proclamation since 2010 and we are still referring to some of these leases to help recover some of the monies for the department,” De Lille said.

tarryn-leigh.solomons@inl.co.za

Political Bureau

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