Cape Town - Finance and Economic Opportunities MEC Mireille Wenger says the province’s resources have been marshalled to assist its official tourism, trade and investment promotion agency, Wesgro improve its standing with the Auditor General of South Africa (AGSA).
Wesgro’s qualified audit status decline dominated the provincial standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) discussion of the 2021/22 Annual Reports of the department’s entities which also include the Saldanha Bay Industrial Development Zone and the Atlantis Special Economic Zone.
Committee member Cayla Murray (DA) had asked for more information regarding the action plan to help Wesgro, how the entity would be addressing AGSA’s findings, what had been achieved to date and the implementation timelines.
Wenger said: “All hands are on deck to try and assist Wesgro to ensure that audit findings are improved for the next financial year.”
She said there was support from the Department of Economic Development and Tourism from within Wesgro itself and also from the provincial treasury and from every opportunity where they could assist and to put systems in place from the various departments of the province.
Last month Western Cape AGSA Business Unit Leader Sangeeta Kallen told the standing committee on finance that non-compliance had been identified at Wesgro and that the matter had been elevated in the audit report.
Kallen told the committee that Wesgro’s audit qualification did not attract any significant loss, it only meant technical adjustments had to be made to the financial statements.
Wesgro had failed to adjust for the duration of the use of Property, Plant and Equipment (PPE) assets even though nothing had gone missing and so nobody was required to account for loss.
The committee heard that Wesgro had since implemented an audit action plan which had been evaluated by the provincial treasury which was now happy with the corrective actions to address the 2021/22 audit shortcomings.
Meanwhile, during the tabling of the Freeport Saldanha Industrial Development Zone’s 2021/22 Annual Report, Scopa heard that the entity had an anticipated R21 billion investment pipeline which is being realised through the historic signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between the entity and Sasol announced on Tuesday.
Sasol and ArcelorMittal South Africa will further be studying the use and offsetting of each other’s emissions, with the goal of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
