Municipal Audit Consistency Barometer: Audit consistency as measure of resilience in local government

Our previous report Operation Clean Audit 2014: Why it failed and what can be learned examined the impact of national government’s policy that all municipalities must achieve clean audits by 2014 (OCA 2014) and identified the risks that arise when policy is not based on statistical analysis. This report shows how measuring consistency in municipal audit outcomes over the five-year term of office of local government can be a useful proxy for analysing, not only the resilience of local government, but also the utility of the provincial and national powers of corrective intervention under s139 of the Constitution.