Cape Town - The Department of Defence's Operation Clean Audit is yielding results, with the department having moved from six qualifications in 2008/2009 to one qualification in the last financial year.
Briefing the media on Thursday, on the release of the department's 2009/10 Annual Report, Defence Secretary Mpumi Mpofu said the department was committed to achieving a clean audit.
"Next year we want ... a clean audit," said Mpofu.
She said that despite the qualification, the department had raked up a number of successes last year, including increasing the total strength of defence force reserves by 29 percent and helping to build three bridges in the Eastern Cape.
The qualification concerned inefficiencies in the department's asset register, but Mpofu said the department had since undertaken a full inventory and verification of its tangible and immovable capital assets.
The department was also engaging with the National Treasury to improve its systems to ensure properly constructed asset registers.
"The reality is we've killed the back of the problem," said Mpofu, who explained that some of the asset reporting problems had related to adhering to Nato's unique reporting environment.
Following the absence of a lease register for the 2007/2008 financial year, she said an intensive exercise between May and June, this year, had been conducted with the Department of Public Works to sort out the records of the lease arrangements.
The department had also instituted a system to ensure it got value for money from its consultants, while also developing procedures to tackle irregular expenditure, which Mpofu pointed out totalled just over R1 billion in 2009/2010.
Included under irregular expenditure - where the department had failed to adhere to at least one procedure before spending on an item or service - was an amount of R22 million, for the processing of the now cancelled Airbus A400 contract.
She said the department, through Denel, was at an advanced stage of negotiations with Airbus to reclaim the R2.9 billion and a further R72 million in interest payments it had spent on acquiring the Airbus A400s.
"There is nothing that suggests we are not going to conclude those negotiations," said Mpofu.
The department's annual report reveals that in the last financial year the air force spent 444 hours transporting President Jacob Zuma and Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe out of the country.
Mpofu said details around the specifics of the President and Deputy President's flights have traditionally not been made available, but added that the country's security agencies were currently considering whether to release these details.
She said if information on flight times and destinations were disclosed, this would put the President and others at risk.
