New Era books a shambles

The Chairperson of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts, Mike Kavekotora, last week shot down every possible excuse presented by the New Era Publications Corporation (NEPC) to justify the poor governance and financial state it finds itself in.

Kavekotora repeatedly emphasised that he has serious doubts that the state-owned newspaper has the capacity to continue its operations into the future.

The NEPC has been given qualified reports for five consecutive years, and an adverse audit opinion for the year ended March 2016.

Kavekotora last week warned the corporation that this essentially means the auditor-general has “washed his hands” of the matter, much like the biblical Pontius Pilate.

“What the auditor-general basically says with these opinions is that he cannot make out heads or tails with your financial records,” he said.

Expressing his opinion, the auditor-general said NEPC had not submitted PAYE returns amounting to N$1.4 million over to the Ministry of Finance, it could further not account for full PAYE liability amounting to N$11 million, could not account for differences on two of its current accounts held with Bank Windhoek and Standard Bank of N$621 000 and N$604 000 respectively, and could not account for receipt accounting to N$1.5 million.

NEPC CEO Audrin Mathe distanced himself from most of the financial disarray, saying most of the existing management were not employed with the parastatal at the time.

“In general terms, the corporation has been in a financial crunch for a very long time. Part of it is as a result of underfunding… there were no rules in the organisation that could really guide anyone on what needs to be done. In just three years alone, we have introduced more than 30 policies that speak directly to issues of governance,” he said.

Mathe joined the NEPC in 2013.

Kavekotora, however, rejected this explanation.

He said he is not convinced that the auditors will accept this explanation and added that the parastatal's finances are still not in order despite the introduction of these policies.

He asked Mathe whether he would have done a different job had NEPC been his own company to which Mathe responded as, “if it was my own institution I would not have let it slumped to where it is now”.

Mathe pointed out that whoever is responsible for the governance issue - even if they are present - must be held accountable.

“There must be consequences when things are not done properly… where things are found not to have been appropriated, there must be consequences,” he said.

Kavekotora, however, told Mathe that he promised the committee during the last hearing that things would improve, however little has changed.

Another committee member Bernadette Jager asked why the corporation found it difficult to improve its financial standing despite being audited year after year.

“One of the issues that we found was that there was not a structure that could take care of risks and audits. The second critical thing we then introduced were policies to address elements which the auditor-general pointed out in prior reports, and some of these were only approved last Friday,” Mathe explained.

He added that there was no internal auditor and said they appointed Ernst and Young in 2013.

Kavekotora, however, questioned whether the organisation is getting value for its money because according to him the auditing function from Ernst and Young does not seem to yield results.

The NEPC chief financial officer Beatus Amadhila, however, noted that internal audits come at a cost and that audits for all departments were not completed.



JEMIMA BEUKES