Inge Mulder
Professionalising the finance teams of SOCs is not a South Africa only issue. According to a 2016 World Bank study on Increasing Professionalism in Public Finance Management, countries still struggle to recruit, develop, and retain staff with the requisite professional skills in areas such as accounting and auditing. At the same time, the business of financial management in government and the public sector is becoming more complex.
It is partly against this background that Sanral recently took a decision to professionalise its finance team with qualifications and professional designations offered by the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA). These entry-level and mid-tier professional designations – Accounting Technician [AT(SA)] and Associate General Accountant [AGA(SA)] – are underpinned by SAICA’s Code of Professional Competence and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) requirements, which ensures that holders of these designations demonstrate the highest level of professionalism, discipline and performance in their roles.
Why Sanral is encouraging staff to get professional accounting designations
Explaining the decision to professionalise the finance team with accounting designations, Mulder, says that there was a need for a special focus on expanding her team’s skills and abilities. “Our finance team is fairly stable. Most of the people who work in the team have been with Sanral for most of their careers. They’ve been with us for a long time and didn’t necessarily get all the qualifications. For us it was quite important that we start professionalising the team. They have the right skills and we believe it was important to sharpen those skills and expand those who want to grow further.”
Mulder adds that although Sanral is more focussed on engineering, it has always encouraged its employees to pursue professional registrations. “In the past we’ve pushed quite hard for people to get their professional registrations in terms of engineering and technical type of professional bodies. Two years ago we started a special focus on expanding people’s skills and their professional abilities in other divisions.”
She says that the skills development initiative is done through Sanral’s Technical Excellence Academy (TEA), which initially focused on dealing with engineers to get them professionally registered. “Now we have expanded to include other functions that are crucial for Sanral such as finance, environmentalists and more. We bring people from provinces and municipalities to be trained and registered for professional programmes. They go through a three-year training through the school and then get placed in various roles. Essentially, the school is not only for the benefit of Sanral, but to train people for roles in the country’s public sector.”
To get the ball rolling, Mulder got in touch with SAICA prior to the start of the COVID-19 lockdown to formalise the process of professionalising members of her finance division. “I went to see SAICA to understand what it is that my team needed to do to register as AT(SA) and AGA(SA)’s. SAICA spoke to the finance team to help them understand the requirements needed to qualify for these professional designations. We are now in the process of the team deciding which designation they would like to pursue. Thereafter we will start implementing.”
She adds that given the skills level of her staff, there are a number of them who could already register as AT(SA)’s. “For us, it’s not about numbers. It is more about how I can get my staff to acquire more skills and if they want to follow the CA(SA) route they can also do that. We are basically exploring and seeing how far we can get with our own staff at Sanral and then we will roll it out for external people.”
Having started to professionalise its finance team with suitable accounting, finance and business skills, Sanral can rest assured knowing that this decision will in the long run enable them to recruit, develop and retain staff who will tackle the complexities of financial management in the public sector with great aplomb.
“We are moving into a different age where we are no longer looking for data capturers. We don’t want people who are just there to process the same thing over and over again. We need to upskill people to be aligned with the constant evolution of financial management,” Mulder adds.
Having achieved 15 consecutive unqualified audits by the AGSA, Mulder says that she is confident that the decision to professionalise Sanral’s finance division will enable them to be on track to achieve a clean audit opinion for the 2020/21 financial year.
