In today’s sitting of Parliament’s Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA), the National Treasury requested Parliament to effectively write off R 1207.374 million of unauthorised expenditure and overspending incurred by the Department of Transport on bus subsidies between the 2008/09 and the 2009/10 financial years.

The DA will not under any circumstances support the writing off of such a massive sum of public funds. Rather, an investigation must be launched in order to ascertain which individuals were responsible for this unauthorised expenditure. Those individuals must then be held to account.

I will therefore be writing to the Minister of Transport, Dipuo Peters, requesting she urgently launch an investigation into this enormous overspend by the Department of Transport. The specific terms of reference of the investigation must include a probe into whether there was any collusion or corruption in the contract process.

According to Treasury’s report, the overspending arose mainly from the failure to introduce a competitive tendering process. This resulted in interim contracts running for close to a decade on a month-to-month basis with very little expenditure monitoring, leaving the door to corruption wide open.

The National Treasury requested SCOPA to approve as a direct charge against the National Revenue Fund the amount if R 1207.374 million, in terms of section 34(1)(a) of the PFMA. Treasury further found that the Department of Transport failed to comply with sections 38 and 39 of the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA).

Government cannot in good conscience expect Parliament to rubberstamp the charging of R1.2 billion of unauthorised expenditure to the pockets of the South African taxpayer.

The DA will not condone deficient financial management practices that place the economy on an unsound financial footing, ultimately put at risk subsidised transport for those who can least afford it.

 

Issued by DA