The government is forking out millions of rands a month on lights and water bills for empty buildings it owns - nearly 200 of which are listed as being at the bottom of the North Atlantic ocean.Parliamentary replies to questions by the DA show that numerous buildings said to be owned by the Department of Public Works are at the bottom of the ocean.Global positioning satellite co-ordinates show that many of the buildings of which the department is the custodian are at the bottom of the North Atlantic.At the end of March the department, according to the replies to the DA questions given by Public Works Minister Thulas Nxesi on Thursday, was custodian of 95,587 buildings and 31,310 pieces of land.Of these, 93,648 state-owned buildings are on 18,267 pieces of government-owned land leased to the other government departments.Of the 95,587 buildings, 1939 are either unutilised or unoccupied.There are, according to Nxesi, 13043 unutilised pieces of land under the custodianship of the department.The Western Cape accounts for the majority of the unutilised or unoccupied buildings (806), followed by Gauteng (224), Free State (163), Mpumalanga (162), North West and Eastern Cape (152 each), Northern Cape and Limpopo (98 each) and KwaZulu-Natal (84).DA MP Dianne Kohler Barnard, who asked about the number of unoccupied and unutilised buildings, said of the buildings "at least 200 properties registered by the department are, according to GPS co-ordinates provided by the department, at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."Yet they still get charged enormous amounts in rates."Nxesi, in his replies, said the department issued quarterly invoices in advance to 26 national government departments, which amounted to R324.5-million a month in rent [about R3-billion a year].The police service pays on average R95-million a month in rent for buildings, Correctional Services R80.9-million, Defence and Military Veterans R76.2-million, and Justice and Constitutional Development R28.8-million.Nxesi said that, on average, R3.9-million a month was paid for municipal rates and taxes.He revealed that R1-million a month was spent on municipal services for unutilised properties and another R3.9-million spent monthly for rates and taxes for unutilised buildings.Kohler Barnard said that the problem boiled down to "catastrophic administration" by the department.She said that the first step towards solving the problem of unutilised buildings was "site visits"."We need site visits for each and every abandoned and under-capacitated building to find out what the situation for that building is."The buildings need to be utilised or sold to anyone who wants to buy them."That money can be used to fix up police stations, hospitals and schools," she said. ..