Multiyear audit plan (MYAP) with accompanying product vision

To help guide our insight journey as an organisation, we invested time through robust engagements to develop our MYAP. The development and approval of this plan by the auditor-general in 2023-24 signified a key milestone in the work that we have been engaged in over the last few years.

While the development and approval of the MYAP was key, the plan itself seeks to bring predictability of audit plans and, most importantly, stability to our audit teams. The plan will also bring about benefits to our external stakeholders in the form of targeted insights.

The MYAP has evolved and progressed from the traditional audit plans to a dynamic multiyear plan that is more risk-focused and theme-based. The MYAP allows for effectiveness and the generation of impactful insights that will illuminate the understanding of our stakeholders. Its benefits include going beyond a singular auditee view to consider how the non-performance of various auditees affects the effectiveness of others and the wider system of government. The MYAP has now focused this on cluster and value chains, taking into account the linkages among different auditees.

To illustrate, there are connections between the work of human settlements (mandated with providing citizens with housing), water and sanitation (that must ensure those houses have running water and proper ablution facilities), and roads and transport (tasked with providing functional and sustainable roads as well as operational transport infrastructure in the areas where the houses have been built).

Another pre-existing element of our audit work that the MYAP has refined is our audit planning. While we have always planned for each of our audit cycles before starting our annual audits, this planning was mainly focused on that specific upcoming audit cycle. Now, with the MYAP in place, our audit teams have been empowered to take a longer term view on planning. The current MYAP provides a fully approved two-year roadmap, and a proposed three to five-year view to be reviewed and refined as we journey along our strategy implementation timeline.

Over the next few years, we will focus on the rollout plan. This plan covers five years and 15 workstreams including infrastructure, safety and security, environmental sustainability, and skills and unemployment.

Below is an outline of the sectors that the MYAP will focus on in each of the coming years:

Signed commitments with executive authorities and oversight chairs

As we use the MYAP to audit what matters, any areas that emerge from our audits as needing the attention of accounting officers and authorities and of executive authorities will be dealt with in two ways.

1. Our audit teams will make targeted recommendations on how those gaps can be addressed.
2. We will solicit commitments from accounting officers and authorities and from executive authorities on the implementation of our recommendations.

To enable the above, we redesigned the management report and collected trackable recommendations. The redesigned management report helps to make our recommendations clearer, easier to understand and consistent in quality, and facilitates tracking and follow-up.

As part of our performance priorities for 2023-24, we secured signed commitments from most executive authorities and oversight structures at both local, provincial and national level to promptly establish plans and procedures to tackle the key audit concerns.

• Metros – 100% signed commitment letters received
• Disclaimers – 100% signed commitment letters received
• Value chains – 78% signed commitment letters received
• Clean auditees – 85% signed commitment letters received

For us, these commitments go beyond the signed commitment letters; they are the first step in accomplishing our work through the #cultureshift2030 strategy.

The commitments signify an understanding of our recommendations and the importance of implementing them on the part of our auditees’ leadership. They indicate the necessary will to improve and set the right tone from the top.

Recommendations tracker

To ensure that the commitments solicited from auditees have an impact, we created a mechanism (a tracker for high-impact recommendations) to ensure that their implementation can be monitored over time.

This enables accounting officers and authorities to keep up with the actions necessary to improve performance. It will also help executive authorities hold auditees accountable for implementing our recommendations.

Aside from the online recommendations tracker, we also defined a process for providing a quarterly status update on the implementation of the recommendations. We will strengthen this discipline to ensure that we track auditee progress and engage on it with the executives, most importantly the incoming administration. The necessary follow-ups and progress tracking will also be embedded in the 2023-24 audit cycle that will take place in 2024-25.

Outcomes of planned discretionary audit work (SDG 4.5)

As part of our planned discretionary audit work for the year, we worked with Afrosai-e to conduct an audit of the basic education sector, focusing specifically on special needs education.

The report will create enormous benefits as it focused on one of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution, namely the provision of education to persons with a disability, deemed a vulnerable group. By assessing government’s progress in addressing the educational needs of children with disabilities, insights from the audit will shed light on areas for improvement. As we move towards 2030, the insights will inform the review of planned targets, identify areas needing attention and prioritise outcomes within fiscal constraints. The detailed insights will be published in a final Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.5 public report.

Conclusion

The insights strategic goal continues to be one of our strongest performance areas as an organisation. Our teams have continued to show strength in their ability to elevate the right insights and increase the quality of recommendations that will help auditees make marked improvements.

Our future focus will be to sustain these gains and then utilise the MYAP to elevate audit insights that speak to the key service delivery sectors and needs of the country. This is because we understand that the clearer and more targeted we are in our insights and recommendations, the more relevant these will be to our auditees and, thus, have a better chance of being accepted and implemented.

Going forward, we will also leverage our product vision to develop audit products and platforms that allow us to disseminate our insights in a manner most relevant to our various stakeholders’ needs and contexts, thus improving our influence prospects.