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Administration
MPAC meeting minutes
Agenda #6August 20, 2026
Summary
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The minutes of the Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) meetings held for the period April 2026 to June 2026 will be presented for noting.
The Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) is an oversight committee of Council. Council established it under section 79A of the Municipal Structures Act. Its job is to scrutinise how public money is spent. It acts much like the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) at national and provincial level. Cape Town was the first South African municipality to establish a public accounts committee. Its best-known statutory task is the annual oversight report. Under section 129 of the Municipal Finance Management Act, MPAC considers and evaluates the annual reports of the City and its municipal entities. It then recommends to Council whether to adopt the oversight report. Minutes of MPAC meetings usually go to Council "for noting". That makes the committee's work part of the formal record.
Transparency is the main public debate. The City's Terms of Reference, adopted on 27 July 2023, say MPAC meetings are open to the public, except special and confidential meetings. The GOOD Party says its request to open task-team investigations to the public was dismissed as not legally compliant. Task-team meetings, where matters are investigated, are generally closed to the public. An April 2026 opinion piece also criticised the committee. It claimed key MPAC discussions are held behind closed doors and that irregular and wasteful expenditure registers are treated as confidential.
The minutes matter because they are one of the few public records of how councillors follow up on financial irregularities, audit findings and executive accountability. For April to June 2026, they would also cover the period just before the 2026/27 financial year began. Residents can read the committee's Terms of Reference and published oversight reports on the City's official website.
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