Audit teams from the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) are currently presenting audit outcome insights with the various portfolio committees during the 2024 Parliamentary Budget Review and Recommendations Reports (BRRR) process, taking place from 7 to 17 October 2024.
The BRRR process enables parliamentary oversight and accountability for public funds and assesses government progress in delivering services. It follows the successful completion of the 2023-24 audits of national and provincial departments and their entities. The portfolio committees will consider the annual reports, which include the audit reports, that were submitted to Parliament by 30 September 2024.
Section 5 of the Money Bills Amendment Procedure and Related Matters Act sets out a procedure that provides for parliamentary committees to prepare BRRRs annually, prior to the introduction of the national budget by the National Assembly. The goal of these reports is to assess the performance of each national department and its entities.
The AGSA, as the auditors of the departments and their entities, plays an important role by presenting the audit findings, root causes and recommendations to portfolio committees and to actively engage the members of Parliament. This process is important to enable oversight as a key role player in the accountability ecosystem to enhance accountability and ultimately improving the lived experiences of citizens.
AGSA’s head of audit, Bongi Ngoma, says, “As the national audit office, we view this process as one of those critical strategic initiatives in the accountability ecosystem. It provides an assessment both of departments’ service delivery performance and of how effectively and efficiently they use and allocate available resources. It also includes recommendations for how auditees can improve their governance systems to ensure that citizens receive the basic services they pay for as taxpayers.
“We look forward to this year’s BRRR sessions, as our inputs to previous years’ sessions enabled those charged with oversight to ask pointed questions of those charged with governance as part of the collective effort to shift public sector culture towards wholesale good governance that will improve the lives of all South Africans.”
The BRRR sessions will take place in both Cape Town and Pretoria, and a list of the committees involved is available on parliament website https://parliament.gov.za/committee-meetings.