News24.com | Treasury still stuck with IT system that delayed reports and hobbled audits, Parliament hears

Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana.

• The National Treasury said it would renegotiate its contract for the ill-fated Integrated Financial Management System.
• Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana said the State Information Technology Agency has not yet helped secure an IT service provider.
• Godongwana said the National Treasury needed to be granted an exemption from SITA provisions to find an alternative service provider on its own.
• For more financial stories, go to the News24 Business front page.

Treasury may have no choice but to stick with a controversial IT system that has repeatedly hampered its audit outcomes and caused a delay in submitting its annual reports, unless a workaround can be found to address red tape hobbling the implementation of a replacement, according to Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana.

The National Treasury briefed Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) on Tuesday about the ill-fated Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS). 

Treasury is looking to renegotiate the IFMS contract where it pays R68 million annually for technical support and a software system it is not using. Nexus Forensic Services compiled a report in 2018 which uncovered impropriety in the IFMS contract.

The National Treasury delegation told Scopa that challenges with the State Information Technology Agency (SITA), which needs to approve an alternative IT system before it can be procured, were behind Treasury's IT blues.

READ | Treasury draws Scopa's ire over annual report delay, impasse with AG

Godongwana said SITA was supposed to assist the National Treasury with securing a service provider, in terms of the SITA Act of 1998, but this process had showed little progress. He said Treasury had been seeking an exemption from the SITA provisions from the Office of the Chief Procurement Officer.

"SITA is supposed to get a service provider for us, failing which we apply for an exemption from the SITA provisions. If we can't get SITA to get us a service provider and the department cannot give us that exemption, we will be first to break the law and get a service provider to do this for us," said Godongwana.

Acting Treasury director-general Ismail Momoniat said on the advice of the Auditor-General (AG), the National Treasury was in discussions with Oracle to modernise the IT systems and possibly renegotiate the contract to address audit the AG's concerns.

"I don't think there's any choice for government but to implement the IMFS system. We need to clearly modernise our financial management systems. The languages that we use in the current ITC systems are pretty old computer languages," said Momoniat.

READ | AG takes Mboweni's Treasury to task for 'fruitless and wasteful' expenditure

Momoniat said maintaining the current IT systems and continuing to pay for them would "not be the greatest" quality of expenditure. He said the National Treasury intended to renegotiate the contract with Oracle.

Scopa chair Mkhuleko Hlengwa urged Godongwana to raise the concerns surrounding the IFMS at Cabinet level and get his fellow ministers or President Cyril Ramaphosa to assist.