Inappropriate Expenditure Dataset

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Author: Tomohiro Hosoi

1. About the Dataset

This dataset contains information on the amount of inappropriate expenditure in the South African Public Sector. The Public Finance Management Act (PFMA) regulates National and Provincial organs, while the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) does Local Government (Metropolitan Municipality, Local Municipality and District Municipality). The dataset aims to estimate how much an institution uses its budget inappropriately.

2. Procedure

The Auditor-General of South Africa releases information on inappropriate expenditures in their annual reports. The Auditor General classifies three categories; (i) unauthorised expenditure; (ii) irregular expenditure; and (iii) fruitless and wasteful expenditure.

The author sums up (i) to (iii) and names it “inappropriate expenditure”.

The author also collects the annual expenditure of each institution from the national budget and Statistics South Africa’s releases.

Then, the author calculates the share of inappropriate expenditure compared with total expenditure. The author named it an “inappropriate expenditure ratio”.

The data are shown in both PFMA and MFMA respectively.