50 Shades of Greed by Ivor Blumenthal

Author:Ivor Blumenthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A matter of accountability

From a corporate governance point of view, it was critically important that within the SETA, before a project was initiated, it would need to be approved by the respective chamber Board structures. These Boards were the closest governing structure to each of the respective industries that constituted the SETAs. Thereafter it would need approval by the Discretionary Funding Committee, a subcommittee of the Council – in other words, the accounting authority of the SETA. Once the Discretionary Committee had approved the project, it was referred back to the Council for adoption and implementation. Thereafter, a Discretionary Committee would be required to investigate every single project that had been initiated within the Services SETA. This would be done on a quarterly basis to ensure projects were on track and that any variances from the stated objectives were explained or those stated objectives were themselves changed to accommodate the project variances.

There were many variables that affected the outcome of every project the Services SETA engaged in. This was inevitable, given that everything we were doing was of a pioneering nature. There were no precursors to those projects implemented in order to meet NSDS objectives. And because this was pioneering work it was inevitable that the initial objectives would continuously be reviewed and changed to reflect reality. This is why the Discretionary Committee was put together – to ensure that the highest level of the accounting authority in the organisation would agree to changes or would in fact endorse progress being made.

Reference also needs to be made here to the audit committee of the Services SETA. Indeed it is the audit committee in any public organisation that is responsible for establishing rules of corporate governance, recommending them to the Council of the organisation for adoption and then for policing and pronouncing on the effectiveness of those rules and variances.

As CEO of the Services SETA for the decade 2000 to 2010, I can attest to the fact that whereas the notion of responsibilities of serving on an audit committee should be automatically understood by chartered accountants, company secretaries and the ilk, in reality a huge amount of capacitation is required of new members of an audit committee. Such capacitation is not about telling these individuals what to think, but more importantly, how to understand that which they were policing, reviewing and pronouncing upon.

It is necessary to engage in this type of capacitation, and that isn’t in itself a negative. However, what I must observe after more than a decade of application as the CEO of a large public organisation is that it is very difficult to get an audit committee to focus on its true mandate and mission.

It is possibly because of the scope of the Skills Development Act, combined with the huge amount of dictates generalised by the PFMA, that on many occasions my frustration would overcome me in repeatedly trying to narrow the focus of the audit committee to doing its work in reviewing what it was responsible for reviewing and pronouncing upon within the Services SETA.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.