Madoda Milazi

Madoda Milazi

Corporate South Africa has regressed in its BEE compliance, KPMG's third annual BEE survey has found.

The survey, released yesterday, showed that companies performed worse than last year when scored against the requirements of the Department of Trade and Industry Codes of Good Practice.

Companies across all sectors scored an average of 8,6 out of a possible 20 points for black ownership, down from 10,8 last year.

An average of 5,1 was scored for employment equity across all industries, a slight drop from 5,4 points last year.

The survey also showed a significant decline in the average score for skills development to 5,7 from 7,8 last year.

All companies scored below the 6,2 average score for management control with only parastatals achieving full points.

KPMG BEE Services director, Sandile Hlophe, said businesses should realise that broad-based empowerment was no longer a nice thing to do, but was now a necessity for economic stability.

He said the survey highlighted an urgent call for faster economic transformation at all industry levels.

"The poor scorecard performance has also been impacted by gender and broad-based BEE targets in the ownership scorecard measurement. Just as alarming is the fact that respondents demonstrated ongoing poor performance in preferential procurement," said Hlophe.

He said the BEE honeymoon period was over and that companies needed to realise that a meaningful scorecard rating was set to become one of the main factors that would impact the future growth and survival of businesses.