Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Wednesday, Industrial Court accounting officer, Anna Mphetlhe disclosed that the said misappropriation of funds specifically relates to court deposits. Court deposits consist of sums, which are either paid to court or into the treasury under the orders of the court. “This investigation relates to court deposits. This is the money paid by litigants and subsequently paid out to the beneficiaries. Sometime last year we discovered and suspected that there has been some misappropriation of these funds. We then engaged internal auditors to assess this with an urgent audit.
They then discovered that in fact there has been some misappropriation,” Mphetlhe told the PAC. In the last PAC appearance, Mphetlhe said they had indicated that the Industrial Court would make a re-advertisement so that beneficiaries could finally get their money but a recent development, which shows that funds have been stolen, forced them to halt everything. “We then realised that it couldn’t make any sense because the whole process involves informing people that we have their money as expected they should then come and claim it,” he said. Mphetlhe added that the re-advertisement process entails calling people to bring the necessary documents so that the court could start processing their payments. “When we realised that we have this problem. We stopped re-advertising because we also did not know the magnitude of the problem.
