SABC employees have been caught in the act, as the auditor-general released its investigation report yesterday.
About 1 465 employees were found to be moonlighting; this was spotted by the auditor-general's use of computer assisted auditing techniques, the database of Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office, and the SAP system.
Yesterday, government's financial watchdog, the auditor-general, released to Parliament the report of its investigations into the state-owned public broadcaster. The SABC has been embroiled in various allegations of impropriety, failure to meet governance standards and corruption, which has caused the organisation to make a loss of R784 million for the 2008/9 financial year.
According to the auditor-general, information from the various systems, and crosschecked with each other, showed 1 465 SABC employees were identified with interests in companies and/or close corporations (CCs), in contravention of the broadcaster's policies.
The report says the names of companies and CCs identified were compared with payments made on the SAP system, for the period 1 September 2007 to July 2009.
This showed that 20 employees had been identified as being directors and/or members of 20 companies or CCs that received monies. This amounted to R3.378 million. This, the report states, is in direct contravention with the corporations own supplier management policy that it quotes extensively.
Among those CCs identified as having interests in companies that received payment from the SABC, was one where the corporation's head of strategy and risk management, Sipho Sithole, has an interest. Sithole, in one of the earlier Parliamentary hearings, said: “If an investigation is to start, it should start with me.”
Sithole claims he had disclosed his interests to the previous SABC board, but no record of this could be found on the databases used by the auditor-general. However, the investigation did show Sithole was a member of the CC in question, which had received R32 750 from the public broadcaster.
SABC CFO Robin Nicholson said, at a Parliamentary hearing earlier this year, the SAP ERP system was one of the most successful IT projects ever implemented at the corporation.
“For the first time ever, we have a system that gives us a holistic view of our payment and management systems,” he told Parliament's Communications Committee, in March.
According to the SABC's 2007/8 annual report, it had spent a total of R108 million on its IT systems, which included the SAP implementation.
The SAP system consists of seven modules: finance, human resources, procurement, sale to cash, business warehouse (a reporting module), procurement, and intellectual property management. Implementation started two years ago and the last module was installed in July.
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