Civil servants ‘steal’ R13.8m in EPWP funds

Permanent government employees posing as beneficiaries of the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) have, for the past 10 years, illegally received R13.8 million in payments meant for the unemployed.

This is according to a written parliamentary reply from Public Works Minister Sihle Zikalala to Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Sello Seitlholo.

The funds looted since 2014 are yet to be recovered by the state.

Zikalala said a verification process by his department done on the civic service payroll system, Persal, at the department of public service and administration identified suspicious transactions on the EPWP budgets “that may have been lost to corruption, undeserving beneficiaries and theft”.

“An estimated amount of R13.8 million may have been lost to corruption across the EPWP sectors and public bodies.

“The R13.8 million was lost through payments done to underserving beneficiaries benefitting from budgets allocated to the EPWP,” said Zikalala.

“These participants are assumed to be underserving participants as they appear as permanent government officials on the Persal system.

“The DPWI [department of public works and infrastructure] will develop standard operating procedures for outlining practical processes which will be followed to stop payments for cases detected and to recover monies paid to beneficiaries through corruption, payment to underserving beneficiaries and theft in the future,” he added.

Seitlholo called on Zikalala to charge the civil servants identified on the Persal system and recover the monies.

“Failure to act now will set a bad precedent and will potentially motivate those who stole EPWP money to reoffend because they know that nothing will happen to them,” he said.

“We have already seen evidence of this impunity with the social grants and the Covid social relief of distress grant.”

He said the millions could have sustained at least 500 unemployed people during the 10 years.

“With a salary of R2 235 per month for one EPWP beneficiary, the stolen money could have provided over 500 more opportunities for the unemployed.

“This is the human cost of corruption on South Africans and the DA will not accept the stance taken by the DPWI not to recover the stolen money and hold the thieves to account,” he said.

Early this year, Public Service and Administration Minister Noxolo Kiviet, revealed that thousands of civil servants were illegally claiming social grants.

At least over 5 000 of them had received the Covid social distress grant in 2020.

The South African Social Security Agency had referred 1 800 of these cases to law enforcement authorities.