Deputy auditor-general’s reflection

Our #cultureshift2030 and its implementation successes continue to be delivered and recognised both internally and externally. This strategy has been enabled by not only the continued strong performance of our people across the institution, but by developing modern delivery capabilities.

Bongi Ngoma

Deputy Auditor-General

In the year under review, we remained conscious that the role of the administration of the AGSA was to establish, operate and continuously strengthen a system capable of producing excellence consistently. This understanding shaped how we approached our mandate, our people, our operating platform and our strategic priorities.

Configured for strategic success and impact

The institution benefitted from the lessons of three years of strategy implementation experience, which helped sharpen our understanding of what was required to move from strategic intent to sustained execution. This enabled us to identify the initiatives that mattered most for the 2025 — 28 strategic period and to focus on those actions that would deliver more impactful outcomes.

A central feature of our work was the continued development of an operating platform that enabled the AGSA to have a more direct and consistent impact on improving the lives of citizens. This platform supported our strategic aspiration to help shift public sector culture through insight, influence and enforcement. Recognising that our resources were finite, we narrowed our focus to six priority areas: finance, people, technology, leadership, culture, and risk and ethics. These areas provided the foundation for our strategy implementation and ensured that our attention was directed to the enablers most important to longterm institutional success.

We took a longterm view of institutional performance. The reporting period was about more than the implementation of individual initiatives; it was about embedding the habits, systems and disciplines that would allow excellence to become a consistent feature of who we are as an institution.

Auditing for impact

In our audit work, we continued to sustain and embed the production of high-impact audit insights and actionoriented influence. We generated audit insights informed by the Pati framework — performance, accountability, transparency and institutional integrity — and strengthened the use of targeted recommendations as part of our audit messages. Internally, we also advanced the integration between regularity audit and specialised audit services teams, supported by the growing use of multidisciplinary teams. This approach enhanced the quality and relevance of our audit insights and improved our ability to influence meaningful improvements in the public sector.

A key area of progress was the institution’s continued work on the material irregularity mechanism. Having attained the target of implementing the mechanism across all auditees by the end of the 2024-25 financial year, our attention turned to strengthening internal processes, guided by the end-to-end review action plan. We focused on eradicating backlog irregularities, dealing efficiently with new ones, accelerating the resolution of irregularities and ensuring that our processes and audit quality remained robust, particularly where findings, irregularities or certificates of debt were contested. This work reinforced our commitment to maintaining trust in the integrity and effectiveness of our audit processes.

To ensure continued improvement of the material irregularity process (and its impact), we will focus on the following in the coming year:

• High-impact material irregularities: identifying material irregularities linked to irregular expenditure, fraud risk indicators and fiduciary duty breaches remains a top priority.
• Timely and decisive progression: ensuring that material irregularities are issued within the audit cycle and matters outstanding for extended periods are progressed decisively.
• Sustained collaboration with the accountability ecosystem: continuing structured engagements with accounting officers, executive authorities, oversight structures and public bodies.
• Recoveries: building on engagements with the office of the state attorney by strengthening collaboration to address civil recovery bottlenecks.

Financially safeguarded for longstanding success

Financial sustainability remained a strategic priority. Although the institution’s strong financial performance was supported by revenue and cost optimisation decisions, we recognised that sustaining these gains would become more difficult as inflationary pressures, auditee payment challenges and key capital projects placed increasing demands on our financial resources. We therefore deepened our focus on revenue optimisation, strengthened the management of contract work creditors and continued to leverage our resource pooling model. These efforts were aimed at institutionalising the financial management disciplines necessary to sustain the savings achieved in recent years.

Our work is demanding and the stakes are high, so employee effectiveness cannot be separated from employee wellbeing.

We also continued to manage our capital expenditure programmes prudently, particularly as the institution advanced major technology-enabled initiatives such as the audit software project. We recognised that largescale technology programmes carried inherent cost and implementation risks, and we therefore maintained a disciplined approach to governance, planning and oversight. Debt collection also remained a priority. We pursued more stringent debt collection targets, ringfencing agreements with auditees and, where necessary, litigation against non-paying auditees.

Digitally transforming for greater efficiency and impact

Digital transformation was another defining feature of the reporting period. Our audit software project was successfully piloted, supported by strong project and cost management risks. We continued to prepare the institution to manage multiple digital transformation rollouts sustainably and to bring new capabilities into the business within the timelines envisaged in our strategy. Technology transformation extended beyond audit.

Within corporate services, we increased the availability of contemporary digital tools, continued to automate key business processes, implemented robotic process automation and expanded the use of business intelligence and analytics. Cybersecurity remained paramount from both technical and behavioural perspectives. We strengthened our technological architecture while deepening a cybersmart culture across the institution, recognising that the actions and awareness of individuals remain central to managing cybersecurity risk effectively.

People-centred and leader-led

People remained at the centre of our ability to deliver on our mandate. The market for top talent in accounting, specialised audit capabilities, data analytics, performance audit, fraud examination and other strategically important business skills became increasingly competitive. In response, we prioritised sustainable competitiveness by attracting, retaining and developing talent. We worked to strengthen our employee value proposition, improve our talent management practices, and explore different remuneration approaches for specialist roles.

A key part of our people-related priorities is the institution’s professionalisation journey. Since its inception, our chartered accountant [CA(SA)] training programme has produced over 2 500 new chartered accountants. These are the professionals who not only go on to contribute internally but also join both the private and public sectors and can, especially in the public sector, act as positive examples of professional conduct and financial management practices.

We have continued to increase the number of CAs(SA) produced by our training scheme and our non-CA(SA) training programmes. These programmes are within our specialised audit services (including investigations and data analysts).

During the year we emphasised employee effectiveness, wellness and engagement. Our work is demanding and the stakes are high, so employee effectiveness cannot be separated from employee wellbeing. Our focus remained on strengthening the leadership and management practices, tools and social capabilities required to help our people manage themselves, their work and their lives more effectively.

An institution that leads by example

Ethics, risk and quality are central to the institution’s character. To restore our ethics rating to prior levels, we took a more integrated and targeted approach to interventions across ethics, people, culture and leadership. We continued to translate ethical awareness into ethical leadership and reinforced the importance of tone from the top through integrity assurance processes aimed at leaders and roles exposed to heightened integrity risks. As a result of all these efforts, we ended the year with an AAA ethics rating. This is the highest ethics rating that the institution has ever attained and illustrates its continued commitment to leading by example.

Simultaneously, we advanced the institution-wide system of quality management, strengthened audit management practices, introduced new technological audit tools and leveraged technology to expand quality assurance processes. We sought to embed a risk-savvy culture and were proud to end the year with a “managed” risk maturity level.

This was particularly important in an environment where the AGSA needed to remain responsive to changing public sector realities while continuing to uphold the highest standards of institutional integrity.

We excelled and continued to lead by example in our transformation initiatives. For the seventh consecutive year, we achieved a broad-based black economic empowerment level 1. This success is a combination of the institution’s intentional work in enterprise and supplier development, procurement decisions, recruitment and corporate social investments.

Our focus was on strengthening the leadership and management practices, tools and social capabilities required to help our people manage themselves, their work and their lives more effectively.

Conclusion

The reporting period was defined by organised performance activity. Our priorities were directed towards building an institution that can stand as a beacon of performance excellence and institutional integrity for another 115 years. We worked towards an AGSA characterised by high talent density, ethics, financial sustainability and responsible use of advanced technologies that enable teams to focus on value-adding audit insights and crucial business decisions.

Our ambition during the year was to sustain the highest levels of public confidence, relevance and stakeholder value. We continued to audit and report in a manner aimed at improving the country’s public service, while systematically adopting habits to secure operational excellence and strategic success.

I thank the members of Team AGSA for their individual and collective contributions to keeping the national audit office a beacon of excellence and for leading by example. We are confident the institution will continue to create an impact for another 115 years.

Bongi Ngoma

Deputy Auditor-General