Corporate governance challenges in Mpumalanga Provincial Government SA

Public sector organisations face escalating pressures from a public that expects them to provide effective and efficient governance of State resources and to account fully for their actions. The public of South Africa has also expressed its frustrations (through the use of public protests and courts of law) to try to force the government to provide effective governance. In most public institutions a lot of irregular, fruitless, unauthorised and wasteful expenditure has taken place and is taking place, which seem to clearly demonstrate that State institutions are not effective when it comes to the management of State resources. This is caused by a number of factors ranging from ineffective management and non-implementation of internal control systems to non-compliance with the legislative framework which give rise to unethical behaviour such as fraud and corruption in government institutions. The limited amount of research that has been conducted on corporate governance in the public sector has focused mainly on corruption with few (if any) investigations examining the matter of internal controls.