‘Veterans’ education a burden’
THE cost of providing free education to military veterans has become a massive financial burden to government.
Yesterday the Military Veterans Department’s acting director general Max Ozinsky said in 2016 the department had supported 5 860 veterans and their families with access to basic and tertiary education at a cost of R142-million against a budgeted R26-million.
He said the number of applications for 2017 had shown a “huge” increase, with 3 800 new applications, in addition to about 5 000 people continuing their studies.
He said the R26-million budget “had proved to be insufficient given the demand” and the department was currently in talks with Treasury in a bid to shift funds.
“We have managed to shift some to reach about R50-million,” he said.
The department’s chief financial officer, Sibongiseni Ndlovu, said they had “huge challenges paying invoices last year” and said most of this year’s budget “has been utilised for invoices from the previous year”.
Ozinsky said they had noted some attempts to “defraud and abuse the system, by among others inflating tuition and other fees”.
“We will conduct a forensic audit to ensure we eliminate fraud and deal with those responsible.”
All military veterans on the department’s database are able to apply for education support. Ozinsky, however, admitted there were some issues with the database.
“We’re taking steps to sort it out,” he said, adding that they did not have the luxury of solving the issues with the database before paying out benefits as this would have an impact on veterans.