The department of Correctional Services has spent more than R64-million in the past financial year on IT consultants, but its staff can barely send or receive e-mail.

This was revealed yesterday in parliament when the standing committee on public accounts studied Correctional Services' report for the 2010-2011 financial year.

Tom Moyane, the department's director-general, stunned members of the committee when he told them that his department had paid R64-million to about 189 IT consultants, brought in to support the department's "unstable" IT systems - but stability had not been achieved.

He said some of consultants had been doing business with the prisons for 25 years.

"We have consultants who have been in the department for more than 25 years, so those are the problems we are trying to deal with," said Moyane.

A shocked Themba Godi, chairman of the committee, said: "It's like a consultant's paradise."

Moyane, who was appointed director-general in 2009, went on to tell MPs that, despite the many millions paid to consultants, including some who earned R820000 for a five-day job, his department's IT network was not reliable.

"With respect to IT, I would not say it is stable. It is not stable hence we are trying by all means to have a stable IT network.

"The discussions with Sita [the State Information Technology Agency] is to create the infrastructure [that would] be functional. We have signed an agreement that this has to be in place next year," Moyane said.

"Because of instability of our network, we cannot say that we have a network that is functional."

Sita is a government agency created to help state entities develop their IT systems.

But Sita's top brass, who were present during the heated committee meeting, confessed to MPs that Correctional Services employees had been battling for years to send e-mails, which are meant to provide prompt communication among staff members.

"The issue that we are experiencing is that e-mails were being held in the server for a number of days, so all the e-mails were being delayed.

"There was a bottleneck created within the Department of Correctional Service infrastructure . it's been a number of years that the problem [has existed]," said Sita account manager Neo Sithole.

Moyane said the department has started building internal IT capacity. He said he had hired at least 40 IT network controllers this year.

ANC MP Salam Abram said the government would continue to be milked by private service providers until it started applying "commercial principles".

"Unless we start applying commercial principles in the manner in which we run a department of this nature, with a budget of R16-billion, we will get nowhere. Would the private sector have allowed things to deteriorate to the level the department has?" he asked.