The Need for Records Management in the Auditing Process in the Public Sector in South Africa

Abstract

There is a consensus among scholars that proper records management plays a significant role in the auditing process. Despite this role, in South Africa, many governmental bodies are issued with disclaimer opinions every year by the Auditor-General of South Africa (AGSA) due to a lack of supporting documentation. Whenever AGSA embarks on an audit assignment, the first constraint it faces is that records either do not exist or, if they do exist, are disorganised, and retrieval becomes problematic, resulting in a disclaimer of opinion. Furthermore, many public organisations rarely see the connection between the lack of proper records management and failures of financial accountability. This article reports on part of doctoral research project by Ngoepe in 2012 that sought to develop a framework to embed the records management function into the auditing process. However, this article seeks to investigate the role of records management in the auditing process in the public sector of South Africa, with a view to entrenching a culture of clean audits. The study relied on both quantitative and qualitative approaches, with the quantitative paradigm as the dominant design, while the qualitative paradigm was used to substantiate numerical data. Data collection adopted a multi-approach with three key sources of data: a questionnaire, interviews and literature review. The results indicate that in most governmental bodies records management did not form part of the internal audit scope, hence many record-keeping issues were identified by external auditors at a later stage. The study revealed that most governmental bodies have established internal audit units, audit committees and records management units, which did not work in unison. The study concludes by arguing that proper records management is one of the key enablers of the auditing process.