TA to the Gauteng Province Department of Health

Detailed description of project Back

The National Treasury has recently done an assessment of financial management capability maturity in provinces and the outcome of this exercise has raised concerns within the National Treasury about the state of financial management within provinces. In particular, is the concern of the financial management capacity and capability of Provincial Treasuries and especially the Education and Health departments to maintain South Africa’s hard-earned fiscal stability. Provincial Treasuries in particular, face capacity and capability challenges to advise, support and provide technical assistance to Provincial Departments to exercise their financial management functions. At a provincial level the concerns are in terms of the following financial management areas: budgeting, planning and budget implementation, expenditure, risk management, asset management and accounting procedures and processes as well as accounting discipline and practice and financial reporting.

The Gauteng Department of Health (GDoH) had a budget of R17.2 billion for the 2009/10 financial year. In terms of the In Year Monitoring submitted by the provincial treasury (PT), the department is currently projecting to over-spend against this budget by R976 million. The majority of this projected over-expenditure is within the “Goods and Services”. The GDoH has had four CFOs (all acting) during the 2009/10 financial year. Among the systematic failures in the department are a complete absence of cash management, ineffective and inefficient contract no control of the suspense accounts that are spread across various divisions, and very little payment control resulting in over-payments to suppliers and little verification of deliveries completed and services rendered.

Based on the above, the GDoH is in serious need of hands on technical assistance in the areas of financial management and accounting. The department is therefore in need of experts to assist with a turn around strategy in terms of the above for a period of six months.

Type of services provided

The services are provided by a senior public finance management specialist. Core services include:

• Improvement of the budget system to cover financial planning, financial management and internal control system;
• Improvement of the budget processes, including budget preparation, implementation, monitoring and reporting;
• Build public finance management (PFM) capacity and foster good budget management processes;
• Liaise with GPT to draft budget system strategy and areas forinterventions for the GDoH;
• Facilitate the identification of, and ways of addressing, deficiencies in budget management processes;
• Reviewbaseline study/ assessment of financial management in theto identify problems and challenges in financial management;
• Draft a detailed turn-around strategy for effective and efficient budgetmanagement in the department based on findings of the assessment;
• Assist and guide GDoH and provincial treasury devise an implementable action plan for the turn-around strategy.