2017/18 Budget Verification Process What we found and how we dealt with Chief Directorate: Local Government Budget Analysis Mandla Gilimani

What does the budget verification exercise involve? The reconciliation process involves ensuring that the following documents all contain the same information/numbers, in other words, the information in all documents must reconcile: No.1 is the legally adopted budget of the Council (hard and soft copy) – NO CHANGES CAN BE EFFECTED AS IT IS THE LEGALLY APPROVED BUDGET OF THE MUNICIPALITY. If however there are errors in the adopted budget, these errors may only be corrected during the Adjustments Budget Process in January/February 2018.  If the information in 1, 2 and 3 do not reconcile, THEN CHANGES CAN ONLY BE MADE TO 2 OR 3 (depending on where the errors are identified).  In addition to the verification of the 2017/18 MTREF budget, all previous years figures should also be corrected to align with the audited financial statements of the municipality and any restatement of figures.

Summary of the returns reconciled in MP

What we found during budget verification and how we dealt with The line item share of surplus/deficit of associate on table A4 – This line item forms part of the total revenue on Table A2 but there is no line item in the return. We had to accept the difference The line item contributions recognised capital – this line item does have a line item in the return but when the extract uploads it shifts it to contributed assets. City of Johannesburg had to put this line item as other revenue and we accepted the difference. In Table A2 – the differences which are as a result of the internal audit department were incorporated under budget and treasury department. No information was populated under corporate services as it no longer exists in the new MSCOA version 6.1 We have too many different items in Table A9 for Capital Expenditure and Asset Register Summary – we are only reconciling totals as a result

Number of municipalities verified that are affected by the discrepancies

MSCOA Data-strings submissions The ORGB data-strings were tested against 15 areas including the trial balance All data-strings submitted by MP municipalities passed this test The big question that we still need to test is whether these data-strings reconcile to the approved A1 Schedule by council If this is not the case the financial system information must be amended so it matches the approved budget information otherwise the results would be unauthorised expenditure

MSCOA Data-strings submissions

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