The Department of Labour has for the first time in six years received a clean audit opinion following meticulous and tight financial controls it put in place, Director-General Nkosinathi Nhleko said in Sandton this week.

He was speaking to his officials on the sidelines at the 12th African Regional Meeting (ARM) of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) currently taking place in Sandton.

“Our success is directly attributable to the proper financial and management controls that we have put in place following years of painstaking and endless audit queries and qualified audits. The obvious and immediate thing to do was to act on all the areas that had attracted negative audit reports from the office of the Auditor-General. This outcome from the auditor proves that we were right in promising his office that we are determined to ensure that a clean audit becomes the Department’s way of life now and in the future.

“The Department of Labour staff at head office and in all the Labour Centres nationally is aware that we are determined to ensure that there is proper financial governance and compliance with all the prescripts of the Public Finance Management Act,” Nhleko said.

An over the moon Labour Minister Mildred Oliphant said the unqualified audit was a stamp of approval from the auditor’s office on the financial management position of the Department.

Nhleko said: “There were a lot of controls put in place especially regarding the management of assets as they had attracted qualified audits in the previous year. The year before the auditors identified capital assets of the Department, the public private partnership (PPP) in the form of information technology (IT) assets like computers as a problem areas as they could not be verified in the Departmental register.

“The cherry on top, is the fact that the Department has been nominated as the best national Department in the category of all national departments by the South African Institute of Government Auditors in terms of its Annual Report. As to how the Department intends sustaining this clean bill of health, we will continue ceaselessly with the implementation of the proper financial management controls and good governance”.