Auditor-general Kimi Makwetu says he will use private investigative agencies if necessary to ensure that public officials are brought to book for looting state coffers.
Irregular expenditure rose to R45-billion in the 2016-17 financial year, he told parliament this month.
It could be as high as R65-billion, he says.
Not all public entities - including government departments, municipalities and state-owned enterprises - reported their financial results by September 30, as required by law. Many of those that did report hid documents from his auditors; Makwetu suspects these could contain evidence of much more irregular expenditure than has come to light.
But because his office does not have investigative powers, or even the power to refer cases for investigation, serial offenders have been getting off scot-free.
Although Makwetu says he believes there are countless instances where a prima facie case for criminal prosecution exists, not a single case has been prosecuted in the 18 years that the Public Finance Management Act has been in force.
He blames the culture of impunity this has created for the fact that irregular expenditure has tripled since his appointment four years ago.
Last year he urged parliament to reassess his powers and give his office more teeth. Since then he has been working with parliament's standing committee on the auditor-general to amend the Public Audit Act to make his office more "active and robust", he says.
Does his office need more teeth, or does it simply need parliament to play its oversight role more effectively - or, indeed, at all - so that when he reports irregularities to parliament, as he does year after year, parliament, instead of ignoring him, gets the investigative institutions to follow up?
"That is the job of parliament, but the reality is that that has never happened," he says. "So the audit office has to play a role, hence our request for the power to refer these matters to investigative agencies."
Otherwise the perpetrators know there will be no consequences.
"When people know that an audit is going to result in no consequences at the end of the day, they sit back and do nothing.
"But if they know that the same independent instrument that finds anomalies in the financial accounts is also going to be involved in taking it to the next level, that may influence a different behaviour," he says.
"Anticipated amendments to the Public Audit Act may certainly lead to criminal investigations and subsequent prosecutions."
How likely is this if the agencies involved are "captured"?
"You're assuming we'd only use state agencies," says Makwetu.
"We can engage the services of a forensic institution that is outside of the state, that has got the necessary skills and competence to carry out the work in a way that will provide the required evidence."
Care will be taken "to avoid a situation where we use an agency that may be captured", he says.
"We will look for those institutions that have got the capability, the knowledge and the capacity to carry out such investigation."
If they're in the private sector, then so be it, he says.
The proposed amendments do not, however, empower him to pursue private prosecutions through the likes of AfriForum should the NPA refuse to prosecute, he says.
Makwetu, 51, has a no-nonsense, professional approach to his job that is informed by a successful career in the private sector, which he made a conscious, and conscientious, decision to interrupt out of a sense of public duty rather than necessity. He grew up in Gugulethu in Cape Town and benefited from wise parents, good education and hard work.
Because of the political violence wreaking havoc on education in the townships in the early 1980s, his parents sent him to St John's College in Umtata.
It was a government school, "one of the best schools that never gets spoken about in the country", he says. It expected excellence and he delivered. After matriculating he obtained a BCom at the University of Cape Town, did his articles at Deloitte and became a chartered accountant.
After working at Standard Bank, Nampak and Liberty Life, he felt the call of public service and joined the auditor-general's office.
He doesn't see why standards in the public sector should be, or be expected to be, any different from the private sector.
He says he wants to see public officials and ministers paying out of their own pockets for their "wayward conduct" with public money.
He says his office desperately needs the power to access documents that officials are determined to hide. Municipalities and government departments "consistently" receive disclaimers. A disclaimer means the auditor did not have access to the requisite documentation and explanations to substantiate suspicious transactions.
The proposed amendments to the Public Audit Act - which he is confident parliament will approve - will "give us the investigative capacity to get to the bottom of these infractions so that it is no longer in the hands of those responsible for causing the disclaimer in the first place", Makwetu says.
"It cannot be that someone ends up with a huge amount of irregular expenditure or prevents auditors from getting all the necessary evidence to make a conclusion - and you just move on to the next year and get another disclaimer and another and another.
"If you run an entity and end up with a disclaimer two or three years in a row then you become an immediate candidate for handover for investigation, which is something that does not happen now.
"If a disclaimer automatically triggers an investigation to get to the bottom of why the documentation required for an audit has not been made available, that will provide a different outcome from what we have now."
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