Authorities will record the voices of and re-fingerprint up to 5 million people, as well as taking the footprints of children under six in a bid to clamp down on rampant fraud and abuse of welfare payments in KwaZulu-Natal, the province with the worst record for such fraud.
SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) spokesman Cuba Mahaye yesterday said the new verification process, to be implemented countrywide, would also be applied to those who received disability and pension grants.
Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini recently revealed that the Special Investigating Unit had uncovered 22 255 cases in which public servants had abused the social grant system. In a written reply to parliamentary questions by the DA, Dlamini said 7 504 of these cases had been uncovered in KZN between 2005/06 and December 2011. Over the same period, 3 412 cases were recorded in Mpumalanga, the second highest number of cases.
In addition, the unit also uncovered 183 cases related to Sassa officials. So far, 59 Sassa officials have been dismissed countrywide, with eight of these in KZN. In addition, 32 officials were issued with written warnings.
The DA’s social development spokesman, Mike Waters, who raised the issue with Dlamini, said suspensions and written warnings were not enough.
“A written warning seems to be no more than a slap on the wrist. And suspensions mean that guilty parties return to the system,” he said.
Waters said social grants provided an indispensable safety net to the most vulnerable people in the country. “For many it is the only means through which they maintain even the most basic standard of living,” he said.
Mahaye said the new verification process would start in KZN in June, and was just one of the new security measures to be implemented by Cash Paymaster Services, the company which won the tender to administer payouts in January.
Irregularities
He said the high number of irregularities uncovered did not mean that officials in KZN were more corrupt than their counterparts in other provinces. Rather, this was because there were more grant beneficiaries in KZN than in other provinces, he said.
According to Mahaye, while an estimated 2 million people collected grants in the province, there were about 5 million beneficiaries as some mothers had up to four children and received grants for each child.
In contrast, the Northern Cape had about 400 000 beneficiaries.
Mahaye said that under the current system, all that was needed to get a grant was a birth certificate from the Home Affairs Department.
Once a grant applicant reached Sassa with the certificate, there was no way to determine if the person was entitled to receive money.
“Criminals have been able to hit us like that for a number of years,” he said.
With the new database, Sassa would be able to link each child to a particular parent or guardian.
Mahaye said they had discovered in the past that one child was used by many individuals to claim grants.
He cited the case of a woman in Hluhluwe who claimed she was so poor she had had to eat cow dung to take her Aids medication. He said that while trying to assist her, it was discovered that she had received child-support grants for four children for a number of years, while she had only one child.
KZN Social Development Department spokeswoman Ncumisa Fandesi attributed the high number of social grant fraud cases in KZN to the department’s vigilance.
“I’m more inclined to think that we are investigating more and catching more crooks,” she said.
When announcing the new biometric-based payment system, Dlamini said it was not about beneficiaries reapplying for grants, but about verifying their information.
SA had 15.3 million grant recipients, of whom 10.3 million were children, the minister said. With the new system, recipients would also be able to access their money anywhere in the country.
