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Cape Town - The Auditor General's office has blamed SAPS middle management for unreliable information on police performance.
Presenting to Parliament's police committee on Tuesday, Auditor General senior manager Surette Taljaard said every year her office had come to the same finding on performance monitoring within SAPS.
The SAPS Annual Report for the 2014/15 financial year revealed that 48% of reports by its members on their response to dispatch call-outs could not be properly verified.
Asked by committee chairperson Francois Beukman what she thought the problem was, Taljaard said it was middle management.
"The internal controls from the national commissioner [Riah Phiyega] level are there, she is trying to implement it. But it either doesn't go down to the level of middle management... or they do not adhere to it."
She said police on the ground did not keep clear records in their pocket books and that led to unreliable information. This, she said, was because of a lack of monitoring by line managers.
"When we go to the stations, it is the cluster commanders and station commanders [whom we deal with]. We just see what they report and what's on the system doesn't correlate. So there is no monitoring from a station or cluster commander at all.
"From an accounting officer role, she [Phiyega] is trying She is putting the policies in place, but it's as if it is not drilled down to middle management."
Phiyega said SAPS was working on its leadership problems.
