Opposition parties in the council attributed the poor audit outcome to poor management of the municipality’s finances.

They also blame the leadership of the council for failure to take action against officials who are not following the Supply Chain Management processes when awarding tenders.

The auditor-general’s report highlighted the poorly-managed asset register as being one of the main reasons for the qualification, leadership not implementing Auditor General South Africa recommendations, lack of consequence management resulting in irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure increment (mainly in Supply Chain Management).

Also read: GTM finally gets an unqualified audit report

Poor application of project management principles, poor understanding of municipal infrastructure environment and accounting requirements and unavailability of some of the required documents for audit purpose.

Meanwhile, the Greater Letaba Municipality has improved from qualified audit opinion in 2016/2017 financial year to a better an unqualified audit outcome in 2017/2018.

“Moving from qualified to unqualified audit outcome means we are heading towards a clean audit,” said Greater Letaba Municipality spokesperson, Lovers Maenetje.

The Greater Giyani Municipality moved from adverse, which means the Auditor General could not make an opinion based on the financial records provided to qualified opinion which is still bad as far as the finances of the municipality are concerned.