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Johnathan Paoli
THE National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) has received an adverse finding from the Auditor-General’s (AG’s) for its 2021/2022 financial report; this emerged in Parliament on Wednesday when officials from both entities were deliberating on student funding for 2024 and on the Werksmans report on corruption allegations.
Officials from the AG’s office and NSFAS briefed parliament’s higher education portfolio committee and the AG representative Ignatius Fourie told the committee that the adverse audit stems from unreliable financial statements provided by NSFAS and said this was due to the inefficient systems and a lack of capacity within the scheme.
“We were not able to conclude on the accuracy of the information in the annual performance report. There’s insufficient measurement definitions and processes to collate and to report performance information. As a result of that we are then unable to do reliability testing, and to see if the figures that are being included are reliable,” Fourie said.
Fourie told the committee that when they audited the books of NSFAS, they found a number of mistakes and that a lot of data was not supported, and subsequently could not be audited, and that there were errors in the calculations.
Fourie said the adverse audit meant that there were a number of material misstatements in the financial statements and the figures in the financial statements were not reliable, nor were they fairly stated.
The office found that there was no reconciliation between what is owed by universities to NSFAS and what is owed by NSFAS to universities and that there was a delay in submitting the annual report by NSFAS to Parliament, which was finally tabled in December last year.
Fourie confirmed that in terms of addressing those matters, NSFAS started the process of reconciling between the institutions’ students data and their own data to determine any overall underpayments to students.
“There are various reasons why over and underpayments can happen, because they do payments on the original registration and if there are changes, like students changing their course, there could be an impact on that,” Fourie said.
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