• ACTis has raised one flag for the DBE and placed two under monitoring.
• While there are some risks associated with improper appointments within the Department, the main risk concerns corrupt awards and financial malpractice. Repeated irregular procurement awards, failures in project execution, and large accumulated irregular expenditure reflect systemic weaknesses in internal controls that may enable procurement abuse. There have been improvements in annual irregular expenditure, and corrective action and formal accountability mechanisms are in place. However, the persistence and scale of these issues point to recurrent attempts to make corrupt awards, with no indication of whether they are related in terms of how they are perpetrated or who benefits from them.
• The combination of leadership risks and procurement-related irregularities at the DBE warrants continued monitoring.