State officials refusing to be screened
STATE employees involved in the government’s multibillion-rand procurement space are refusing to undergo security screening, State Security Minister Bongani Bongo and his director-general, Arthur Fraser, have told parliament.
Bongo and Fraser appeared before the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) to explain why thousands of government officials and employees of state-owned companies dealing with supply chain management had not been vetted as a mechanism to tackle corruption.
This is despite a 2014 cabinet memo instructing the State Security Agency to vet all supply chain employees. Scopa wanted answers after it emerged last week that at Transnet alone‚ only 7% of about 700 supply chain management employees had been vetted.
Fraser said there were a few reasons why a lot of officials were not vetted.
He said in many instances state officials simply refused to be vetted.