Durban - While eThekwini Municipality urges its customers to pay for services rendered, it has emerged that a good number of city councillors and staff members in arrears, are either having their salaries docked for far less than what is owed, or it is not docked at all.
This was revealed by the city’s audit committee chairperson Siboniso Shabalala during an executive committee (Exco) meeting this week.
Presenting the audit report for the final quarter of the 2021/2022 financial year, Shabalala cited a lack of proper oversight as one of the factors negatively contributing to the city’s financial controls. The final quarter covers the period from April to June 2022.
The report said that there was ineffective management of staff and councillors who were in arrears in terms of deductions. Deductions are made from the salaries of staff and councillors to satisfy arrears for utilities and rates.
It said a representative sample of 20 out of 2 801 staff members and 20 out of 48 councillors who were in arrears were evaluated during the period under review. The report noted that:
The monthly deductions from employees and councillors were below the amount of municipal services charged monthly as per the consumer billing system.
One employee was in arrears of R488 000 and there were no documented deductions or credit authority to collect it.
In some instances no deductions were made against some employees because of the number of garnishee orders and personal loans they had. Twenty-five employees were found to have a total of R108 027 in garnishee orders and personal loans that they were servicing.
In addition to this, the audit committee noted that the municipality’s debt recovery was ineffective. Sampling of 20 commercial and 20 residential account holders revealed that an amount of R774.1m was owed to the city for over 180 days by 15 account holders.
The report also raised concern about the city’s payroll system. Some of the findings under the item included:
Non-compliance with overtime legislative requirements with instances of hours worked exceeding the provision of the legislation.
Overtime hours paid for exceeding the pre-approval hours without any motivation for the additional hours.
“Management should adopt a holistic approach to mitigate the risks associated with this vital process of payroll management,” Shabalala told Exco members.
ANC Exco member Nkosenhle Madlala said they had noted the report and welcomed the recommendations made by the committee.
Commenting on the councillors and staff owing the municipality, he said they wanted to ensure that each case was dealt with on its merit.
“Our position is that everyone needs to pay for services rendered by the municipality because this enables it to expand its services to all parts of the city,” said Madlala. He stressed the importance of management ensuring that customers were billed correctly.
Responding to the issue of overtime, Madlala said they had noted the concerns raised by the audit committee but found that the overtime covered the period between April and June.
“As you will recall, we were living under difficult circumstances with the city dealing with the floods in April and this meant an around the clock response and this would have impacted on overtime,” the ANC councillor said.
However, he said it was important for the management to ensure that the overtime budget wasn’t abused.
DA eThekwini caucus leader Thabani Mthethwa called for decisive action from both the political leadership and the administrative wing in the council, citing the code of conduct for councillors as one of the principles that should guide the municipality.
“Right now the municipality needs every rand and cent that it can get, and therefore Speaker Thabani Nyawose should call any councillor who hasn’t honoured payments to do so swiftly.”
He added that councillors as public representatives and law makers had to lead by example in paying for services.
He said the city manager should apply a similar tactic for staff members whose accounts were in arrears.
IFP exco councillor Mduduzi Nkosi called on the municipality to ensure that all those who were in arrears were aware of what they owed. “It cannot be fair to expect individual customers to pay for services rendered and then have an instance of councillors and staff not paying for the services. The municipality must have a system where each customer knows and gets reminded on a regular basis as to what they owe.”
Westville Ratepayers’ Association chairperson Asad Gaffar described the revelations as concerning and shocking, and called for swift remedial action.
“Clearly this shows that this municipality is not being run properly and needs to be put under administration. We cannot continue to carry on like this while service delivery continues to fail.”