The home affairs department has increased the cost of consulting its national population register (NPR) to finance its substantial upgrades to the service.
Home affairs minister Leon Schreiber said on Monday that the new, more efficient system would act as an economic catalyst because it would take milliseconds to verify identities. An upgraded NPR verification service will be rolled out on July 1 with a failure rate reduced to below 1%.
“This vastly enhanced service, which will boost service delivery from government departments and enhance financial inclusion in the private sector, will be accompanied by appropriate tariff increases implemented after widespread public consultation and after concurrence was obtained from the minister of finance,” Schreiber said.
In a government gazette on Monday Schreiber announced the new pricing structure for single, real-time verifications during peak hours at R10 per transaction and an off-peak tariff for non-live batch verifications of R1 per verification field request.
“This cost is appropriate for the service provided, and is not unreasonable when viewed against the costs charged to clients of the organisations utilising the online verification service (OVS),” he said.
This is the first tariff increase since 2013 when the home affairs department introduced an OVS to third parties that connected them to the NPR. This allowed registered users to check identities and other biographical information of their clients against the home affairs database. Companies consult the register to verify identities and know their customers.
Schreiber said the underinvestment in the NPR caused by “staggering underpricing” meant that more than half of verification attempts failed.
“For more than a decade, banks and financial service providers have only paid R0.15 for real-time verifications against the NPR. This is below market-related rates charged by the private sector for comparable services and far below the cost to the state of providing the OVS, which deprived home affairs of the resources required to maintain the NPR.
“Extreme underpricing has led to profiteering and abuses by some users that overwhelm the NPR and cause failure rates in excess of 50%, contributing to ‘system offline’ failures at home affairs offices and threatening national security.”
A dysfunctional system undermined the ability of the government to combat identity and financial crime, the minister said.
Schreiber noted that since its rollout more than a decade ago at inappropriately low cost to users, the demands on the OVS had far outstripped the capacity at which it was originally designed. Since then, there had been no substantive upgrade to the system while demand and the costs of maintaining the infrastructure increased year on year. This resulted in a high failure rate.
“Even in the case of successful verifications, response times often take hours, thereby defeating the purpose of real-time verification. Both of these factors are directly undermining services that require such verifications, including through the OVS and at home affairs offices.”
The minister said some users exploited the unreliability of the system to create third-party verification services that charged prices vastly higher than those of the department.
For the first time, the new system would introduce an option for users to do “non-live batch verifications” during off-peak hours at a significantly lower fee than real-time verifications. Schreiber said this would offer both a cost-effective alternative to real-time verifications and incentivise users to stop overloading the OVS’s live queue, reducing the problem of “system offline” at front-line home affairs offices.
Other government departments would not be charged for the service.
Schreiber said: “A healthy NPR is also a prerequisite for a functional digital ID, as the NPR must become the central database against which identities are verified as home affairs becomes a digital-first department.”
Organisations that would like to be connected to the new OVS must send an email to: verifications@dha.gov.za
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