Abstract
The misalignment between financial and performance auditing in delivering engineering projects (infrastructure), increases and perpetuates unethical behaviour. It further increases lack of transparency, unaccountability, and no respect to the rule of law, unregulated interventions, weak quality controls, and the manipulation of Municipal Financial Management Act (MFMA), weak legal processes and more. The auditing control systems were established to ensure accountability for public use of public funds, compliance, safeguarding public resources against corruption, wasteful expenditure and unauthorised practice. Organisations are solely using this (auditing) to determine their performance and check if internal processes are adhered to/followed (ticking boxes). Organisations receive a clean audit and become insolvent shortly after that or they ask for government bailouts.
The recent auditing profession, processional conduct, ethical behaviour, report and relevance leave a lot to be desired. Underperforming State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), infrastructure developments or construction projects, ghost projects, fabricated progress on capital expenditure projects and abandoned engineering projects receive preeminent appraisals [19] [20] [28] [49]. The current auditing controls are failing dismally to detect these [28] [49]. This research focus on engineering projects at the public sector (national, provincial and local level in South Africa). The library information from the Association of Municipality Electricity Utilities (AMEU), South African Revenue Protection Association (SARPA), Good Governance Africa (GGA), South African CitiesNetwork (SAcN) and Metropolitan Municipality (metros) websites were used as data collection sources.
Focus group discussions, observations, national and regional meetings were used as a mechanism to ascertain data. Visible service delivery projects were selected and analysed to validate the results. The process was a multiple stage process. Different Metros and project categories were used. The results show it is imperative for all stakeholders to align all internal and external control systems, delivery of engineering projects strategies, monitoring and evaluation, auditing (forensic, financial, performance), organisational performance and more. The introduction of grassroots Board of Professionals (BoP), offers Citizen Based Performance Management Structures (CBPMS) and government effective and efficient ways of delivering engineering projects with the involvement of citizens.
M.Phil. (Engineering Management)