1 of 1999) is the primary public finance management law in South Africa.
[1][2] A piece of framework legislation, its implementation is governed by regulations and directives produced by the National Treasury.
[3] The act was drafted by the first post-apartheid government to modernise public finance management standards and comply with Section 216 of the Constitution of 1996.
[4] It replaced and superseded various pieces of apartheid-era legislation subsidiary to the Exchequer Act, 1975.
In particular, the new public finance management framework was viewed as a necessary complement to the service-delivery focus of the Reconstruction and Development Programme,[4] given that previous legislation focused on expenditure control to the detriment of reporting and accounting on the basis of non-financial service-delivery outputs.