Dear Members,
Attached is our review of this year’s Draft 2022/23 Annual Report for Bitou Municipality.
The Plett Ratepayers’ Association continues to take an active role in monitoring and evaluating management performance and to demand and ensure responsiveness, openness and accountability from those running our affairs at all levels.
We acknowledge that the Finance team have, in addition to the clean audit, made significant progress in improving revenue collection, cash flows and controlling expenditure. Bitou municipality will acknowledge, however, that much more work is required to achieve financial health and this report should have outlined in more detail their efforts to achieve this.
The standard of reporting, unfortunately, continues to deteriorate. We can only assume this critical report is outsourced as there is a lack of context to a number of concerning trends and there continues to be a number of serious omissions regarding senior management salaries, disclosures of family members receiving awards, suspensions and disciplinary actions, and PAIA’s received and responded to. The annual report itself, whose purpose is to provide an honest report to enable residents to evaluate executive management performance, does not comply in many respects with the minimum requirements and is not providing the necessary value.
We have sent our oversight report to the Auditor-General and to Provincial Government requesting that they take all steps within their powers to ensure that the annual report achieves the purpose it is intended to.
Kind regards,
Steve Pattinson
Chairman
|
