Rundu Town Council has not been submitting its financial statements for the past seven years. 
This was revealed during a public hearing by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts at Rundu on Monday. 

The committee says the Rundu Town Council has not been compliant with International Public Sector Accounting Standards, citing a number of inconsistencies. 

The committee says receiving an adverse or disclaimer audit opinion for Rundu has been the status quo for almost two decades. 

Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts Chairperson, Hendrik Gaobaeb, stated, "These are the funds that belong to the public. And if it is such that they are getting this adverse disclaimer, they will also lose public trust, as the public is not secure that their resources are used for the intended purposes."

Some members described the council's financial affairs as a crisis. 

Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts Member Professor Job Amupanda stressed, "You cannot have a situation where people cannot explain a N$60 million, you know, expenditure; you can't explain that expenditure. So it's a bad, bad, bad crisis. How can you not be able to account for it? You get N$3 million from NORED, and you are recording it as N$1.6 million. What happened to N$1.4 million? It's a huge problem. I mean, you are selling land, and you are selling land through the receipts, not through proper transactions and things like that. It's very chaotic. They say, No, there was a wrong amount of N$8 million debited in 2018. Then the following year, the wrong amount moved from N$8 million to N$96 million. Now you have N$105 million that was apparently wrongly debited from the account of a customer."

The committee were not satisfied with the responses given by the council and will summon the local authority at a later date, allowing them to collect more evidence. 

There are currently no punitive measures for institutions like the Rundu Town Council; however, plans are in the pipeline. 

"We'll make our recommendations to the parliament to decide on those kinds of local authorities, what punitive measures can be taken, whether they will dissolve the council, and whether they will get rid of a particular CEO; it will depend on the recommendation of the committee to the parliament and, finally, the decision of the parliament."

The Council promised that they would be able to submit all outstanding financial reports by October this year, but the Parliamentary Standing Committee is not convinced.