The eThekwini Municipality Audit and Risk Committee (ARC) was concerned over the City Integrity and Investigations Unit (CIIU) and whether it had adequate capacity to process the current volume of investigations it had.
The consolidated ARC report for the second quarter, which ended at ended 30 December 2024. was presented to the eThekwini Executive Committee (Exco) meeting on Tuesday. The purpose of the report was to provide feedback to Exco about the significant findings between 1 October 2024 to 30 December 2024 to prevent unnecessary risks from materialising.
Siboniso Shabalala, ARC Chairperson, said the CIIU report for quarter two was presented recently. Shabalala said the ARC raised concerns regarding the approved structure and the areas that are not funded and that this can have a direct impact on the ability of the CIIU to fully carry out its mandate and may hinder progress in addressing and clearing caseloads timeously.
Shabalala said the other area raised was whether the CIIU had adequate capacity to process the current volume as well as whether the various systems and processes in the justice system are creating further delays in closing out the reported items.
“Management gave assurance that ongoing discussions with the Chief Financial Officer continue to source additional funding for the unit and currently, it is being done on an incremental basis. The unit does ensure the competency of the employees but some of the long outstanding cases regarding the implementation of consequence management that is reported, rest with line management to address and close. Ongoing engagement with the units continues to address these matters,” Shabalala said.
Shabalala said that ARC also requested management to review how the Unit will address capacity if there is an influx of cases. Shabalala said the resourcing of the unit continues to remain an area of concern as it is critical to improve consequence management and the number of open cases to reduce significantly. Shabalala urged city management to implement action plans that address the root cause of the findings with a sense of urgency.
On other issues, the ARC raised questions about ethical hijacking after the ARC found that an internal audit was able to exploit certain vulnerabilities on the CCTV devices which allowed them to upload and delete unauthorised application packages.
“Internal Audit attempted to exploit certain vulnerabilities of critical and high impact via specific open-source software tools after receiving approval and confirmation from management and were able to exploit one vulnerability on the Windows 7 environment which resulted in denial-of-service conditions. However, we were unsuccessful in exploiting the other vulnerabilities,” Shabalala said.
The ARC found that in terms of business licensing the usage of a manual system is in place.
“We enquired from management when the automation will be completed. Management did indicate that they are working closely with the Information Management Unit (IMU) to plan the system in this financial year, and implementation will then follow in future financial years, budget-dependent,” Shabalala said.
City Manager Musa Mbhele said the CCTV machines will be assessed because the IMU had recently taken over the management of that function. Mbhele said that the IMU will ensure the CCTV system is secured/upgraded or replaced so that they can run on the latest operating systems (OS). Mbhele said patching legacy operating systems is not practical and a number of devices were outdated and some had unsupported software.
With regard to business licenses, Mbhele said that the city was working closely with the IMU to plan the system with the target date envisioned for June 2025. Mbhele said that there were also ongoing discussions to source additional funding for the CIIU.
“The unit does ensure the competency of the employees but some of the long outstanding cases regarding the implementation of consequence management that are reported rest with the line management to address. We are addressing all the concerns,” Mbhele said.
