🏛️The Auditor General's report

The Auditor-general South Africa

The Auditor-general of South Africa (AGSA) is the supreme audit institution. The AGSA has a mandate stemming from Chapter 9 of the Constitution to maintain a procurement and provisioning system that is fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective.

AGSA is given legislative effect and regulated by the Public Audit Act 24 of 2004 (PAA). It is required to audit and report on how taxpayers' money is spent in all national, provincial and muinicipal departments of government, and many SOEs. This means that every year, it examines the annual reports from these bodies in order to ensure they are free of irregularities and financial "misstatements". Misstatements may be errors or deliberate attemtpts to mislead.

Its reporting is also aligned to international standards such as the Global Reporting Initiative, King IV principles and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

What do AGSA's audit outcomes mean?

AGSA reports include a high level opinion of the financial statements. These are always one of six options:

Clean/unqualified

There are no material errors in the financial statements, no issues with performance reporting or non-compliance with legislation.

Financially unqualified

There are no misstatements in the financial reports, but there may be findings related to performance or legislative compliance.

Qualified

There are material misstatements in the financial reports, or not missing evidence to demonstrate the statements are accurate.

Adverse

A substantial portion of the financial statements contain misstatements.

Disclaimer of opinion

The organisation has not provided enough documentation to make any judgement possible.

What do the AGSA's reports look like?

AGSA produces three types of report, all of which can be found here.

• PFMA (Public Finance Management Act) Reports relate to national and provincial government

• MFMA (Municipal Finance Management Act) Reports relate to municipal government

• Special Audit Reports relate to one-off investigations

The reports are broken down into separate documents by year. On both the PFMA and MFMA pages, you will see a general report, which consolidates the overall findings at a high level, and includes some notable details from the individual departmental reports. These are long, narrative reports with infographics.

From the 2021 PFMA report.

The data that underpins this report is also published as an Annexure of audit outcomes. This is usually a spreadsheet document that looks like this.

The first rows of the 2021 PFMA annexure 1.

There are other annexures too, including one which looks at financial health and supply chain management (SCM) indidcators. These may be much more useful than the report itself if you are looking for data to compare performance between similar organisations.