Regulatory woes update

You will have see the earlier blog concerning the regulatory issues faced by the Academy for Facility Management (Academy).

• The Academy has during this past week received correspondence from the attorneys of the Council on Higher Education. In this letter the CHE makes a complete reversal on the earlier threat of the Director: Accreditation. No reasons are provided for the decision, which unfortunately reinforces the perception that the CHE operates in a rather arbitrary manner when it comes to the registration and accreditation of Private Higher Education institutions.

The matter has however not been resolved as the CHE’s correspondence introduced a plethora of factual errors as well as a new threat into the equation. The Academy unfortunately had no option but to instruct its lawyers to take the matter further.

• On Friday (13 Oct.), the Academy established via our own enquiries with the CSD (Central Supplier Database), the Academy became aware that our CSD status has been restored to ‘compliant’.

This means that SARS has now corrected its earlier misallocation of the Academy’s provisional tax payment, but has as yet failed to advise either the Academy or its auditors.

It has been exactly a month, to the day, since we became aware of the CSD’s listing of our status as ‘non-compliant’.

SARS has therefore been responsible for denying the Academy the ability to do business with public sector institutions for 1/11 of its annual business cycle and this during a period when the Academy has historically had high registrations numbers from state institutions.