TRC Final Report

Volume 1

Chapter 11

Part FinanceDept

Subsection 4

Contracted services

33 Other operating expenditure was budgeted for after wide consultation with various other organisations. In particular, the Commission looked at the operating costs of legal practices to get a reasonable idea of the type and extent of the expenditure it might incur.

34 The Commission subcontracted the Legal Aid Board, which already had the necessary infrastructure, to provide legal aid services on its behalf.

Revenue

35 The Commission’s revenues were allocated as a separate line item in the Department of Justice’s budget, which was voted on and approved by Parliament.

36 In addition, many international donor countries expressed an interest in the Commission and offered their financial assistance to add value to the process. The Commission was initially under the impression that it could accept donations directly. Legal opinion provided by the state legal advisers, however, indicated that all donations received by the Commission had to be formally approved by the Department of State Expenditure through the Reconstruction and Development Fund.

37 These bureaucratic procedures resulted in a number of delays in the launching of projects for which the Commission had obtained donor funding. The net result of these delays was that the Commission was not able to extract optimum value from the various projects funded by donors. The various donations and their purposes are set out in an attached schedule (Appendix 3).

38 National economic challenges and priorities meant that the Commission operated under strained financial conditions virtually all the time. The Commission was originally allocated a budget of R8 million for the 1995/1996 fiscal year and a budget of R29 million for the 1996/1997 fiscal year. After completing the required estimates of income and expenditure, it was abundantly clear that this budget was inadequate. The projected budget requirement for the 1996/1997 fiscal year was in fact R79 million. This meant that the Commission had to approach the Treasury Committee for additional funding.

39 There was strong resistance from the Treasury Committee to making further funding available. After much negotiation and a line-by-line budget item evaluation, the Treasury Committee agreed to make a total of R69.419 million available for the 1996/1997 fiscal year.

40 At the same time, the Treasury Committee indicated that the total budget available for the 1997/1998 fiscal year would not exceed R50 million. The Commission’s budget requirements, however, (based on its operating levels at the time) were in the region of R82 million. This meant that the Commission had to downscale its operations much earlier than envisaged and step up its requests for donations.

41 As the Commission’s work progressed, it also became clear that it would not be able to complete all its work within the prescribed eighteen-month period, or even after a further six months’ extension. After consultations with the Ministry of Justice, the Commission’s lifespan was extended by an additional four months in order to give it enough time to complete all its work. In order to fund this extension, an additional R15.716 million was made available to the Commission for the 1997/1998 fiscal year and R21.904 million for the 1998/1999 fiscal year.

42 At the time of drafting this report, the audit for the 1996/1997 fiscal year had just been completed, and the Commission had remained within its approved budget of R69.419 million. Financial statements for the completed fiscal periods 1995/1996 and 1996/1997 are attached as appendices 1 and 2.⁴