OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Thursday
ADMINISTRATIVE slip-ups are costing the South African taxpayer tens of millions of rands in overpaid public service salaries, according to a report by Auditor General Shauket Fakie.
More than R10.6m was paid out in the 1999/2000 financial year to 557 workers who had died, said the report, which was commissioned in 1998 and published in Pretoria this week.
The report brings to light a host of other administrative mistakes, like the case of 194 civil servants who were paid salaries by more than one department, costing taxpayers some R3.3m.
“This mostly happened because of administrative slip-ups in the transfer of people from one department to another,” said Louis van Rooyen, the executive manager of the auditor general’s office.
Likewise, at least 460 public servants continued to receive full employment benefits after they had retired at the age of 65, costing the state R20m.
The state also forked out more than R10m because 587 workers were not scrapped from the personnel register after they had resigned.
The auditor general’s investigation was a sample audit and focused on the police, the justice department and correctional services, the three state departments with the biggest salary bills.
Van Rooyen said some corrective measures had already been introduced. The possibility was also being examined to link to the payroll system to the population register to help prevent salary payments to deceased staff. Another sample audit would be done in the near future to determine whether corrective steps taken so far were effective, van Rooyen said.
The auditor-general’s office also scrutinised the health and education departments in the Northern Province, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, North West and Gauteng provinces.
The probe was undertaken to determine the effectiveness of head counts conducted earlier in the public service to eliminate overpayments. It found that “overpayments to fictitious beneficiaries were still identified approximately 18 months after the head counts had taken place.”
The auditor general has recommended that the misspent money be recovered as soon as possible and that the salaries of staff members who were not reflected in the head count be frozen. – AFP