Barry Streek
Chaos in the payment of social grants by South Africa’s nine provincial governments resulted in overspending of R570-million in the 1999/2000 financial year and payments of R28,7-million to corpses, salaried people, non-citizens and other illegal beneficiaries.
This was disclosed in a report to Parliament by Auditor General Shauket Fakie, based on an audit of social grants by provincial governments.
The report says that in the 1999/2000 financial year nearly R17-billion was budgeted for the payment of old-age, disability, maintenance, foster care, war veterans’, combination, care dependency and child support grants.
However, six provinces overspent their budget Northern Province by R180-million, Eastern Cape by R154-million, KwaZulu-Natal by R126-million, Mpumalanga by R115-million, Gauteng by R60-million and North West by R27-million.
Fakie says the Western Cape, Free State and Northern Cape paid out less than budgeted.
The illegal payments of more than R28-million were made to 3 179 people, according to audits in August and September last year. They included 337 people who were dead, 592 who received old-age grants but were younger than 60, 621 who were being paid a salary, 849 who were also receiving a government pension and 499 non-South Africans.
Fakie found that illegal overpayments often resulted from “problems with identification documents”. The relevant control measures should have been implemented to ensure that information was accurate.
In some cases agents were allowed access to the social pensions database to update information. There was a risk that they could change information or register fictitious beneficiaries. The reliability and integrity of data on the database was “questionable” and the Department of Social Development had indicated that the software used was outdated.
Fakie said that contracts with agents responsible for payments on behalf of the provincial departments were not always awarded to the lowest bidder, and that this had resulted in additional costs of R72-million.
“The domain of social security is poverty prevention, poverty alleviation and social compensation, as well as income distribution. Many issues relating to social security are sensitive, as they touch on the material interest of the organised workers and the unorganised poor,” he said.