Briefing the Portfolio Committee on Justice and Correctional Services on Wednesday, the head of the SIU revealed that over half-a-billion rand in debt is owed, posing a risk to the unit’s financial stability.
Breytenbach says the SIU needs to be paid for the investigations it conducted on government’s behalf. “The office of the SIU is a semi-government department and so they just ignore them because there really are no consequences for no paying them. In the past the SIU has written off these amounts and now the amount is so staggeringly high that it can’t be ignored. Action must be taken as it is a huge amount and of course it is going to impact on the abilities of the SIU to do very good work on their investigations.
“We are really working hard, we engaged the National Treasury. We’ve engaged our minister and he’s aware of the debt levels. While SIU is in a sound financial position, we are what the auditors will call a going concern. There are no risks related to SIU but if we don’t recover this debt it has got the potential that down the line it will pose a risk to SIU operations,” says Mothibi.