I can’t say that I am vaguely surprised that we are receiving notices about upcoming BEE conferences and seminars. I love reading them, some of the conferences are hosted by people who helped in the drafting of the (still unpublished) 2006 codes of good practice. Others fail to mention that the exempt micro enterprise threshold is below R5million annual turnover and are ultimately going to dupe a whole bunch of companies into attending when they are exempt. One company has gone so far to suggest that even if you are exempt you might want to develop a scorecard because you may get more points that way (a feeble attempt to solicit unsuspecting EMEs).
If you are an EME don’t get sucked into the hype and rubbish. The codes still have to be published and gazetted and this is a drag for companies like Caird. We have enough information to begin the consultation process but we can go only so far. Stay away from these courses and seminars until the codes are published. Even those courses and seminars offered by those who helped draft the codes are no guarantee that this is what is going to be ultimately published.
As far as scorecards go – I think this will happen:
- I think that it is going to take a while for EMEs to convince both existing and prospective clients to understand that they are exempt. They are probably the companies that will need to understand BBBEE the best, because many of their clients won’t know what is going on.
- Most clients want to see some form of a scorecard – it’ll take them a while to understand how a score impacts on their own preferential procurement score.
New BBBEE scorecard
We’ve broken the dti’s latest booklet into both QSE and generic scorecards. You can download it off the Caird website or from here.