The road for South African municipalities to achieve clean audits appears to be a difficult one. Apparently, it is said that municipalities will take 120 years to attain clean audits. It is argued in this article that a sound internal control environment (some call it control environment) as a sub-system of a control system in municipalities, is required and should be conceptually structured within the context of local government in order to form the basis for interventions. In order to achieve this, an in-depth analysis of relevant literature, as a method used in this article, was embarked on. The literature review's findings reveal the weaknesses pertaining to individual and institutional inputs necessary to establish a sound internal control environment. Based on these findings, it became evident that suitable individual and institutional input requirements should be available in municipalities in order to create a sound inter