The continuous failure of South African municipal administration, governance and
oversight, renders the effectiveness of the municipal audit committee,
questionable. The purpose of this study is to propose a framework for improving
audit committee effectiveness in South African municipalities. The purpose was
achieved by obtaining an understanding of the factors influencing the effectiveness
of the municipal audit committees from municipal stakeholders and audit
committee members; further exploring the factors identified from the stakeholders
and audit committee members through a literature study and review of best
practices; and acquiring input from stakeholders regarding the relevance and
completeness of the framework developed, leading to refining of the framework. A
constructivist ontology and interpretivist epistemologies were employed to achieve
the research objective and a qualitative research methodology was embraced,
comprising of focus groups, a literature study and an interview survey. The agency
theory was adopted as the grand theory for this study and the resource-based
view of the firm theory was applied to the literature, to extend and complement the
existing literature on the effectiveness of audit committees. During the first phase
of the study, the Interactive Qualitative Analysis method was harnessed for
conducting the focus groups and analyses of the data. Purposive sampling was
applied to select 15 participants who were stakeholders and audit committee
chairpersons of municipalities, to conduct two focus groups. Twenty-five affinities
(factors) and 139 sub-affinities (sub-factors) that influence the effectiveness of
audit committees were identified, consolidated into five themes. The second phase
was to explore the factors identified by the focus groups through a literature study.
The findings of the literature study and focus groups were employed to develop
the draft framework consisting of a Framework for audit committees and a
Framework for municipalities. The development of these two guides led to a third
guide for National Treasury, provincial treasuries and SALGA. In the third phase,
purposive and snowball sampling methods were used to select participants to
semi-structured interviews, followed by the refinement of the framework. Based on
the findings, a framework is proposed, comprising factors that can improve the
effectiveness of audit committees in South African municipalities. Furthermore,
activities that can be centralised to enhance the effectiveness of municipal audit committees are identified, and an improved framework for agency theory is
introduced. / College of Accounting Sciences / D. Phil. (Accounting Sciences)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/27549 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Legodi, Audrey Hlabisang |
| Contributors | Erasmus, Lourens Jacobus, Coetzee, G. P. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (xx, 533 leaves) : illustrations (mostly color), application/pdf |
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