Bribery, intimidation, noncompliance and a lack of cooperation from the holders of mining and prospecting licences are some of the challenges that the mineral resources department has faced during licence audits, Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu said in Pretoria on Monday.

Shabangu said that 1 475 prospecting inspections had been carried out by her department. There were still 2 191 audits outstanding.

The department was encountering major problems with rights holders who were not honouring site inspections.

Often officials would arrive to find no one present.

She said that there appeared to be a major problem with Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) entities. Many did not keep the required information on site for inspectors to check.

"We would like to make an appeal to rights holders not to compromise the audit process by trying to intimidate, bribe or discredit the process."

One mining company in the Northern Cape was facing criminal charges for attempting to bribe an official. The company was not named.

Very often BEE partners were not present when inspections were carried out, and Shabangu was concerned that there were incidents of "BEE fronting".

"Some of the BEE partners who attend the site visits (by department audit inspectors) are clueless about the operations and are over reliant on consultants. A clear case of fronting, because it means the owners of the rights are not actively involved in what they applied for," she said.

Shabangu said that fronting distorted the levels of transformation that had taken place in the mining sector.

The audit is expected to be completed by February next year. In August, Shabangu placed a six-month moratorium on the processing of prospecting permit applications, to allow for an audit of licences granted since the promulgation of the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act.

She was confident that by the time the moratorium was lifted, the audit would be completed.

The department was working to speed up the process of issuing prospecting and mining right licences.

If applications were fully compliant, she envisaged that prospecting licences would take three months to be issued and mining rights would take six months for the department to be processed.