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It hopes this exercise will clear up the large-scale mess in which the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) does not know what quantity of arms it has.

The process also aims to satisfy the auditor-general's office .

The assets register was one of the critical areas that led to the auditor-general giving the defence department a qualified audit for the fifth year in a row.

The ministry's deputy director- general for defence logistics, Mthobisi Zondi, told Business Day yesterday that cleaning up the register was the result of their comprehensive "intervention and repositioning programme" and was designed to address the auditor-general's concerns.

He said the programme aimed to modernis e asset management systems and property liability methods . It would also introduce procedures to ensure accountability for equipment.

Zondi said a thorough assessment of the problem areas identified by the auditor-general had shown that most asset-tracking and financial reporting within the various units of the SANDF were old fashioned. The greatest challenge was that all assets would require a standardised code after a tedious process of being manually and physically identified and counted.

However, the ministry would be using professional audit companies to work with its personnel to do this. The procedure included travelling to the 550 units in SA that receive and discharge goods.

The process would teach defence personnel to correctly capture data.

The auditor-general said the SANDF's financial statements did not put any financial value to its weapons and ammunition inventory.

This indicated that the defence department had no idea of how many weapons it had .

Zondi said: "Despite the element of theft, which is not as catastrophic as reported, we are finding that the system of updating assets and accounting for various categories of equipment and weapons assets have not kept pace with technology."

To complicate matters, the military had been capturing information based on Nato codes while the treasury used a system called Standard Chart of Accounts which led to the systems "not being able to talk to each other, especially for the purpose of accounting".

As a result, the ministry had found it difficult to properly report on the whereabouts of some of its assets . It also could not fairly estimate the number of assets that were depreciating. Furthermore, it could not deliver proper figures on how much had to be paid for services rendered and property bought , especially during the last month of the financial year.

"In a bid to standardise the accounting processes we have brought in KPMG to help us introduce national standards and proper accounting procedures for every unit within the force and the ministry," he said.

The ministry was also implementing the Government Immovable Asserts Management Act to evaluate the worth of the force's buildings and infrastructure.

Zondi said the exercise would clean up the various categories of the asset register and produce credible figures acceptable to the auditor-general's office.

Zondi said the ministry planned to use technology, including helicopters and unmanned aircraft, to monitor the potential damage and danger from unexploded equipment in training camps.

He said the treasury was adamant that the defence ministry should quantify the possibility and extent to which its equipment could "hurt the environment and the general public".