POS Machines Soft Spot For Revenue Leakage - Harare City Audit ⋆ Pindula News

A recent audit suggests that Harare City Council could be losing millions of dollars through Point of Sale devices. The audit discovered 19 POS machines unregistered with the Council which were used to collect revenue.

A statement in the audit minutes reads:

A 100 percent stock count on the 43 district offices and other council revenue collecting centres revealed a total of 188 POS machines. There were 19 POS machines that were located at district offices but could not be found on the bank list.

It was also noted that there was a …POS ID which had dual identification codes hence the risk was that it was open for abuse and manipulation.

It was noted that some of the banks did not have corresponding BIQ cash books, hence audit could not extract the BIQ cash books of such banks.
Because of the lack of BIQ cashbooks, transactions made from such bank accounts were being posted into cashbooks in use on the day.

The recent audit echoes findings of the previous audit which indicates how vulnerable the city is by using POS devices. The audit further states that the finance department does not appear to be in full control of their deployment across council premises. It further reads:

Findings into the audit were that there was a mismatch between HCC register of POS devices, their physical count and the banks’ register of POS devices deployed. The city’s POS devices were not integrated with the BIQ system.

The HCC often cites lack of adequate resources for poor service delivery.