Sassa rolls out new card plan for grant payments
Beneficiaries assured there’ll be no illegal deductions
FROM October, millions of grant recipients will sleep much better, knowing they will be receiving their monies in full.
That is if the SA Social Security Agency’s (Sassa) promise is anything to go by.
Still reeling after the Constitutional Court bashing for its lax approach in the insourcing of the payment of grants, Sassa’s wheels appear to be finally in motion.
This was evident in an interview with spokesperson Paseka Letsatsi in the agency’s head office in Pretoria this week. He is adamant the nightmare of beneficiaries experiencing illegal deductions on their grants every month was finally over.
“The data is now with Sassa and the new card is configured in a manner that you cannot deduct money from it. The only amount deducted is a funeral cover, which is not more than 10% of the grant – that’s the maximum. Child support is exempted, you can’t take a funeral cover on it,” he said.
This came after the Concourt last year ordered that beneficiary data be safeguarded by Sassa instead of by outgoing grants payment service provider Cash Paymaster Services (CPS).
“We are servicing the most vulnerable but even us, people who know technology, sometimes get scammed… Unfortunately, the old card was operating like any other card and were easy to defraud,” he said.
Asked if Sassa had considered taking any action against CPS for the illegal deductions, Letsatsi said there had been instances where payments had been reversed.
“But the system was in such a way that you could not pin it down to an illegal activity,” he said. “It was a very lengthy struggle until we took a decision that the new card we are introducing was not going to allow any transactions.”
Without mentioning CPS’s sister company, Moneyline (both Net1 subsidiaries), Letsatsi said Sassa recently found out that recipients were offered loans on condition they opened an EasyPay Everywhere Account. This account replaced the Sassa card. All this was done without recipients providing proof of income.
“When some of them were asked (during a walkabout) where they got the cards, they would say they were approached and told that the Sassa card was no longer in use but to use this card (EPE). If they didn’t, they were told they wouldn’t get grants. People were duped. That card is linked to a loan, you get R1 000 – a loan that must be repaid every month. It has interest,” he said, adding that recipients were being urged to revert to the Sassa card.
“We won’t have instances were people will call us saying: ‘I don’t own a cellphone but R50 has been deducted from my account for account’. It won’t happen – never,” he said.
The invalid CPS contract, Letsatsi insists, would not be extended beyond September, the deadline extended by the court while Sassa and the SA Post Office finalised the new payment system.
“There were problems in the past three weeks in terms of payment. The Concourt took a decision that it was extending the current contract with the same conditions. However, the court was aware of the fact that CPS is a company that must make money – a business. But the court further said if CPS wants an extra amount, it must have a meeting with Treasury and agree on a fee.
“That fee must be endorsed by the court. However, CPS was requesting us to pay extra without the approval of the Concourt – they were expecting us to pay,” he said.
Testament to Sassa having grown a thick skin against CPS was evident last week when the company threatened to pull out of the deal last month should Sassa not pay the extra amount per each recipient.
“There was no way we were going to pay an extra cent to CPS before the Concourt makes a decision,” he said.
The agency currently pays CPS R16.44 per beneficiary. The company was now allegedly demanding R45.
“The contract between ourselves and Sapo has kicked in.
‘We have norms and standards so Sapo must comply’
“The minister has made it clear that she will not go back to the Concourt to ask for an extension. “There are 2.5 million beneficiaries. What we have requested is that people who stay close to a post office, where there’s a pay point, which has the proper infrastructure to absorb those people – I’ve seen it with my eyes,” he said.
“We have norms and standards of a pay point so Sapo has to comply with the norms and standards that we ourselves have set out.
If Sapo can have all those things, people can just move from point A to point B, as long as they won’t be inconvenienced in terms of distance.”
There must be a pay point every 5km-radius, he said.
“Our first point was to start with Gauteng and Western Cape and metros like Durban and Port Elizabeth where there is infrastructure availability. When we did that, it drastically reduced the numbers.
“There’s a huge portion who get money from this month from merchants, the next from a pay point.
“It means they have the capacity to use electronic method of payment and these are the people we are targeting to say ‘use a merchant, a post office of a bank of your choice’.
“This reduced the number to 800 000. These are the people in the deep, deep rural areas. We’ve met with the Banking Association of South Africa (Basa) and they are ready.
“What they have done is they have superimposed their infrastructure with that of Sassa so they can identify where there’s no infrastructure at all.
“Basa has said that if in point A, if there’s no infrastructure at all, they are willing to invest to ensure that people don’t have to travel beyond 5km’.
“CPS made a statement saying that if we don’t pay them the amount they were asking by June, they would not pay (grants). We have not paid what they were requesting yet people were paid. We had to stand firm on our position, to say we cannot do that. If we did that, we would have been in violation of a court order.”
Asked if there were contingency plans in case the new payment system experienced challenges, Letsatsi said: “There’s no way people can’t be paid. Sassa is committed to pull whatever stops to make sure people get their money. We’ve had various engagements with SAPS, Defence Force and various other sectors to make sure that whatever happens… confident as we are, we are ready.
“Basa says they were able to cater for these people, even if we have mobile ATMs”.
Relations between Sassa and Sapo, he said, had improved after the relationship experienced a turbulent start.
“Once you don’t play as a team, you lose. It happens all time, when people have to get into other people’s space, you unintentionally think people are going take your space only to find out that that’s not the case. The intention is to ensure that Sapo and Sassa complement each other. There are no differences.”