Department of Correctional Services Annual Report worrying

The Annual Report of the Department of Correctional Services (DCS) for the 2011/12 financial year has revealed some extremely worrying features. These include:

• R71,377 million of fruitless and wasteful expenditure;
• R215,596 million of irregular expenditure;
• a material under-spend of R893,9 million, due mainly to a failure to appoint employees in posts for which funding had been approved; and
• yet another qualified audit opinion of the financial statements of the Department on account of "uncorrected material misstatements" in the financial accounts.

The Auditor-General's report on the Department (contained in the Annual Report) was also extremely unflattering about the DCS's performance during the year under review. Amongst other things, the Auditor-General found that:

• The Department's performance as reported was not "valid, accurate or complete";
• only 47% of the targets set by DCS for itself were achieved;
• the DCS did not have effective and transparent financial and risk management controls in place;
• the Department did not have effective measures to prevent irregular and fruitless expenditure;
• DCS employees obtained contracts from the Department without declaring their interests, while other employees performed remunerative work outside the DCS without getting permission;
• the DCS had not implemented measures to prevent the abuse of sick leave by employees;
• there was no IT governance framework in place; and
• there were "high numbers of recurring misstatements, fraud cases and persistent control weaknesses in the financial reporting process".

The DCS occupies a crucial role in the criminal justice system. Unless it can correct offending behaviour and rehabilitate offenders, prisons will more and more become revolving doors for ever-increasing numbers of more violent offenders. While it is true that some improvements have been made since the period covered by this report, much more still needs to be done to turn the Department around.

What is lacking is a sense of urgency and purpose. The new Minister needs to tell his Department that "business as usual" is not good enough, and that he will not be satisfied until all the matters and irregularities identified by the Auditor-General have been rectified. The Democratic Alliance will be holding the Minister to account in this regard.

What is perhaps most disturbing is that the DCS habitually blames personnel shortages as the reason for its inability to deliver effectively on its core mandate. Yet the DCS is unable to fill the vacancies in the Department for which funding is available. There is only one word to describe this dereliction: it is plain, simple incompetence.

The National Commissioner will have a lot of explaining to do when he appears before the Portfolio Committee to justify this annual report.

Statement issued by James Selfe MP, DA Shadow Minister of Correctional Services, October 1 2012

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