REPORT ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE PORTFOLIO COMMITTEE: PROVINCIAL OVERSIGHT VISITS

Background Portfolio Committee for Public Service and Administration and Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation has a legislative role to exercise oversight The report emanates from the Portfolio Committee visits with the DPSA and DPME in March 2017 in Mpumalanga and Limpopo

Signing of Performance Agreements by Accounting Officers DPME and Offices of the Premier are currently responsible for monitoring the compliance on the signing of Performance Agreements through the outcome 12 in line with 2010/11 policy which was spearheaded by the Public Service Commission For 2017/18 financial year Mpumalanga had a 100% submission rate (improvement from the previous year and Limpopo had 91% submission rate on time and 9% which was submitted after the due date) There is a draft revised policy which proposes to view performance of the Accounting Officers coherently with organisational performance The proposed draft policy suggests that evaluation committee of Accounting Officers be chaired by the DG in the Presidency This draft policy however has not been approved and has missed two targets ( April 2016 and April 2017) Due to delays in the approval process, the current directive for the performance appraisal to occur between the Accounting Officer and the Executive Authority remains.

Coherent working relationship between DPME and PSC to collaboratively monitor the state of the public service While both the legislative and executive branches and all levels of government need to carry out M&E, this need not lead to duplication of the collection of information and reporting. The challenge is to ensure that M&E is complementary across the branches and levels of government, and that data and analysis are shared. The DPME and PSC have taken steps to streamline common areas of interest for more coherent work results. These steps will also strengthen the existing collaborative work in the areas of Management of Ethics, Fraud and Prevention. With regards to frontline monitoring visits, the DPME will ensure that they plan in collaboration with PSC in the selection of public service sites and indicators to be monitored for the next financial year in order to minimise conflicting findings.

Performance Agreement of Health Accounting Officers (national and provincial) and payment of suppliers within 30 days 2.4 Paragraph (c) of the letter “Executive Authority should ensure payment of suppliers within 30 days to be part of the performance contracts of the Heads of Department” The recommendation is supported.

Inclusion of the “Payment of Suppliers within 30 days” as an area of measurement in the Performance Agreements of Accounting Officers The draft Performance Management Development System (PMDS) requires the inclusion of key government focus areas - the “payment of suppliers within 30 days” would be accommodated within this area as it is currently one of the government focus area. However, in the absence of the approved PMDS policy, DPME is utilizing its existing capacity to facilitate the payment of suppliers within 30 days. Furthermore, Accounting Officers are advised to include this area within the Financial Management Core Management Criteria in their current Performance Agreements The unit has facilitated payments of suppliers to a cumulative amount of R327 million to various service providers who lodged their complaints with the unit This figure represents a success rate of about 70% of the cases referred to the DPME

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