The office of social development minister Lindiwe Zulu has clarified comments she made in parliament relating to the wrongful payment of R140m in grants to dead beneficiaries.
On Thursday, in a written reply to a parliamentary question by the DA’s Jacques Smalle, the office said the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa) had “wrongly paid” more than 70,000 deceased social grant beneficiaries over the past three financial years.
But Sassa said: “As much as we are aware of some corrupt activities taking place, which our fraud and compliance unit is dealing with daily, we can confirm that most of these [payments] are not due to corruption, but rather to timing of reporting of deaths by the responsible family members vs the date on which Sassa extracts payments for the affected clients.
“As part of the normal social grant payment extraction process, Sassa extracts payment beneficiary details and compares the details with home affairs monthly. The purpose is to test if the beneficiaries are still alive. This process takes place about the 22nd/23rd of every month.
“In an instance where the client is found to be deceased, such a record is deactivated on the Sassa system before extraction of payment — no money is generated for such clients. This interface process with home affairs is automated,” spokesperson Paseka Letsatsi said.
Letsatsi said when a beneficiary died at home, the agency was only alerted to their death once a family member reported it to Sassa or home affairs. When that takes place after the verification date, it “can result in some payments being prematurely released”.
Regarding the 75,000 figure mentioned by Zulu, Letsatsi said that that had been over a long period.
“Of the 18-million clients paid monthly by Sassa, there is an average of 2,055 clients a month who died in the past three years whose circumstances could [not] have been ... in Sassa’s control.”
This was “0.01% of the total population paid by Sassa monthly”.
Letsatsi added that Sassa was working with the department of home affairs to ensure the systems stayed connected and a “fraud-prevention strategy, aligned to the national anti-corruption strategy, had been implemented by Sassa ... to increase awareness”.
TimesLIVE
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.