House Chairperson, comrades and hon members, as indicated, we have four reports, three of which are for entities and one for a national department. Unfortunately, all three entities whose reports we are presenting had disclaimers and the national department received a qualified audit opinion.
The Energy Sector Education and Training Authority unfortunately has had repeated disclaimers owing to a lack of leadership, both at board and management levels, and a lack of skills. The employment practices are such that they repeatedly and continually employed people who do not have skills. We hope that the department, especially the Minister of Higher Education and Training, will be able to make interventions, as promised during the hearing.
The same applies to the public sector; it is basically the same problem. The disclaimer on the National Student Financial Aid Scheme was more of a technical nature, although there were issues that I believe my colleagues will be able to cover when they come and make interventions. However, all these three entities have disclaimers. The last one is the Department of Defence and Military Veterans. We know that this department has had challenges over the years, but there has been a progressive reduction of issues of qualifications. For the year under review there was a lot of work done by the Secretary for Defence and the chief financial officer, who were employed on 1 April and had to deal with the audits as they came through. From the reports that we see, they were able to do a lot of work to reduce the qualifications to about two.
The two that are remaining are not new qualifications; they are old and persistent qualifications, especially the issue around the management of assets. It is an issue that we are aware of that the department in conjunction with the Auditor-General, are dealing with in trying to find a mechanism and an instrument that can be used for better accounting on these assets.
At the time of the hearing, there were ongoing investigations or, rather, there was going to be a report on the use of consultants in the department. We would be very happy to get that report and to have a sense of the extent to which there is internal capacity to deal with issues or whether it is dependent on external consultants.
In all these reports, House Chairperson, we are calling on the executive authorities to report to the House, within 60 days from today, on the progress that is being made on each of the issues that have been identified so that the recommendations we have made should not just lie there and gather dust. We need to continually have a sense of what is being done.
I am therefore introducing these reports to the House. House Chair, the arrangement is that my comrades in the committee are going to make more detailed inputs on each of these reports. I thank you.
There was no debate.
Declarations of vote: