Expenditure Bill 'a slippery slope to theft'

The chairman of Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Themba Godi, and his counterpart in the Gauteng legislature have raised serious concerns about the Unauthorised Expenditure Authorisation Bill.

The bill makes provision for provincial legislatures to request that their respective public accounts committees regularise expenditure declared unauthorised by the auditor-general - provided they provide valid reasons.

The concerns follow the authorisation of R1.4-billion in unauthorised expenditure by the Gauteng legislature's public accounts committee three weeks ago. Gauteng's provincial departments requested that the committee authorise about R4.8-billion, which has been accumulating on its books since 2005.

Godi said the bill was undermining the work of the auditor-general and could expose departments to corruption.

"It should not happen; it talks to poor planning. Huge unauthorised expenditure incurred by provincial governments, especially in 2008, is unacceptable. If you take into account that the monies being approved go into billions, it is a huge concern."

He said if the bill were made law, provincial departments would have a blank cheque to spend liberally, knowing they can always push for the money to be regularised.

"You don't want to give the impression that even if the spending is wrong, it can be authorised," Godi said.

Sipho Makama, Godi's counterpart in the Gauteng legislature, said the bill was a "big problem".

"If you have poor planning, accuracy in your budget will also be poor. The possibility of the situation being exploited for people's own ends is highly likely. If you are disorganised, you open yourself to corruption," Makama said.

Jay Kruuse, head of the Grahamstown-based public watchdog the Public Service Accountability Monitor, said many provincial governments supported the bill.

He said: "It is the start of a slippery slope. It could result in blanket theft. It creates a breeding ground for corruption."

Kruuse said monies declared as unauthorised expenditure sit in departments' books and accumulate annually. Provincial departments either have to recover the money or ask that the expenditure be authorised by the appropriate public accounts committee.

He said departments recover the money by trimming their budgets or through bank loans should the public accounts committee refuse to authorise the expenditure.

Trimming budgets and borrowing money to make up for unauthorised expenditure badly effects service delivery, he said.

However, Kruuse and Makama said the approval of unauthorised expenditure was not inherently bad - if departments can justify why it was done.

Makama said there were times when departments legitimately exhausted their budgets and they started spending money for which they had not budgeted - which is deemed unauthorised expenditure.

"There are situations where it happens for justifiable reasons," he said.

• The Western Cape legislature approved unauthorised expenditure to the tune of R89-million in February and;

• KwaZulu-Natal approved unauthorised expenditure of R2.7-billion in July.