LAUSR

Today’s newspapers, magazines and articles show particular concern with non-compliance in work procedures that improve the performance of government functionality in South Africa as alluded to by the Auditor General South Africa (AGSA) reports 2010–2015. This assertion is reinforced by Scheepers (2012): ‘... negligence is a failure to comply with the standard of care that would be exercised in circumstances by a reasonable person’. The implication of Scheepers’s assertion can be summarised as the effect of non-compliance on organisational success, in that non-compliance impacts negatively on staff performance, increases government wastage and results in suffering of the community and consequences that go far beyond the penalties and fines assigned to the individual or the department. Taylor’s famous dictum is thus useful here: ‘... in the past, man has been first, in the future the System will be first’ (Kanigel 1997; Rastegar 2004:78); this stresses the need for systems to operate optimally over individuals. Therefore, compliance is not mere rhetoric or mere formalities; rather, it is an avenue to rid a system of controversies and uncertainties and to improve a system rather than improving an individual.