Third Special Report

Third special report on the financial management of government’s covid-19 initiatives 12 SCOPE OF OURAUDIT Our audit focused on the use of the funds made available for the covid-19 response, the covid-19 initiatives implemented by municipalities and the expenditure related to these initiatives for the period March to December 2020. The three focus areas covered and reflected upon in this report are:  procurement and use of PPE  delivery of covid-19-related infrastructure projects (quarantine facilities, temporary shelters and water infrastructure) and the procurement and installation of water tanks  other covid-19-related initiatives (including water tankering, sanitation services and food parcel initiatives). The audit included a fraud risk and control assessment and an assessment of whether municipalities have implemented preventative controls to ensure that the funds are spent for the intended purpose. We performed the audit at 43 municipalities selected based on:  the portion of the funding that municipalities were paid – we included all municipalities that had been paidmore than R16million from the conditional grants allocation by the end of August 2020  the top three contributors to irregular expenditure in each province based on the irregular expenditure incurred for the 2018 - 19 financial year  themunicipalities identified through our environmental scanning of media reports, Special Investigating Unit (SIU) reports and Public Protector reports. For the remaining 214municipalities not selected for the audits of covid-19municipal relief funding, we audited and reported on t he use of funds fromApril to June 2020 as part of the normal 2019-20 audit cycle. We performed basic covid-19 audit procedures at all the selected auditees. We also performed additional work at some of the auditees to report on our different focus areas (see figure below). Municipalities selected for covid-19municipal relief funds audit DM– district municipality, LM– local municipality, MM –metropolitanmunicipality