Nawaal Deane
The Road Accident Fund has embarked on ambitious changes to put an end to large-scale corruption by some attorneys and by syndicates operating in the fund.
The new projects are in response to an audit report last year that slammed the running of the fund and found that “systematic fraud is being perpetrated against the fund through the submission of fraudulent claims”.
The state-sponsored accident insurance scheme has been hit by a series of scandals that led to a commission of inquiry in 1999, chaired by Judge Kathy Satchwell.
One of the new controversial changes is the fund’s move to pay claimants directly and not through attorneys who act on their behalf. This move will be met with some resistance from attorneys who say the power of attorney bestowed by their clients entitles them to be go-betweens. But others have pledged their support for the move.
“We at Fair Civil Law are 100% in favour of the proposal by the Road Accident Fund to pay out directly to the claimants. Attorneys have stolen many millions from their fund clients and not a single attorney is in jail,” says Snowy Smith, a complaints investigator at the non-profit organisation which supplies the public with free legal advice and fights for consumer rights.
Humphrey Kgomongwe, the CEO of the fund, says he is committed to implementing this system at the end of March and has liaised with law societies with regard to the process.
“This will ensure that claimants are fully compensated and eliminate the perception that the fund acts in the interest of attorneys rather than claimants,” he says.
A pilot project “Lock up the Facts” was launched over the festive season. This small-scale test involved members of the fund being notified of an accident in Gauteng by the traffic department and immediately gathering the facts at the scene, then “locking” the information to be processed.
“Central to some fraudulent claims lodged with the fund is the distortion of information with regard to such factors as the number of people injured in an accident, the extent of the injuries, the condition of the vehicle,” says Kgomongwe.
Claims can be submitted to the fund up to three years after the accident.
“We no longer want information that is stale because this allows for fraudulent claims to be slipped through that are difficult to be verified,” says Kgomongwe.
“We captured 300 accidents over the festive period and the immediate benefit is that claims can be processed much faster with very concrete information.”
The fund aims to implement the project in six areas in Gauteng over three years.
The audit report also pointed out that the fund has a claims process and payment system that constitute “an archaic paper-based process subject to the almost unfettered discretion of the 385 key employees” of the fund.
Kgomongwe says that the move from a paper-based system to a computerised one is under way. The fund’s computer system will be linked to the departments of home affairs and transport to determine whether people and vehicles cited in accidents are registered in the respective departments prior to finalisation of the claim.