Sassa targets corruption ahead of grants take-over

THE South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) plans to intensify its clampdown on corruption and fraud among its officials ahead of its takeover of the payment of social grants from September.

Briefing the social development portfolio committee on the agency’s budget this week, Sassa’s strategy and business development executive manager, Raphaelle Ramokgopa said staff aimed to improve efficiency and uphold good governance in the present financial year.

“One of the critical things is to ensure we investigate all reported fraud and theft cases,” Ramokgopa said.

The agency planned to finalise 70% of reported cases by the end of March 2019.

Ramokgopa said another priority was to ensure biometric identity access for SOCPEN – a national information communications technology system that, with provincial governments, co-ordinates the provision of social grants. This was being implemented by Sassa staff who had access to the system, which would be extended to all employees.

“When people were defrauding the state, they used to steal the passwords of others. In order to deal with corruption ... we introduced biometric identification access,” she said, adding that beneficiaries were being registered using the biometric identification system.

The system forms part of plans to phase out Cash Paymaster Services’ (CPS) role in the payment of social grants. Abraham Mahlangu, Sassa acting chief executive, said the biometric identification system reduced fraud. Sassa internal audit manager Thandi Sibanyoni said the agency had received 430 complaints of fraud by the end of March 2018. “Some of those cases involved syndicates, which take very long to investigate. We were able to finalise 322 and with the remaining overlapping into the next financial year.” ,” CPS services would not be required after September. “We have taken over certain functions. Sapo (SA Post Office) has taken a big chunk of the services.”