The 21 000 civil servants caught fraudulently claiming social grants should all be prosecuted, face disciplinary hearings and be made to pay back the money, two rights monitoring groups said on Wednesday.
”It is vital that justice in these cases be seen to be done or there is little chance of curbing this type of fraud within the civil service,” the Grahamstown offices of the Black Sash and the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) said in a joint statement.
The Black Sash’s Jonathan Walton and PSAM’s Stacey-Leigh Joseph said that in April last year the social development department spent R60-million on the Special Investigating Unit (SIU), enabling the unit to hire 200 investigators to combat social-grant fraud, particularly in Mpumalanga, Limpopo, North West, KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng.
At the time, said Walton and Joseph, Minister of Social Development Zola Skweyiya said that fraudsters would be prosecuted and the money would be recovered.
In July, the SIU said that 21 588 civil servants were irregularly receiving grants and that just 3 000 had agreed to start repaying this money. Repayment schedules are up to 31 years.
”While we recognise that such civil and criminal legal action may be onerous, there seems little point in having conducted the investigation if those civil servants caught defrauding the state are not punished and their ill-gotten gains recovered. So far, only 650 government employees out of the 21 588 [3%] have been charged and convicted,” said Walton and Joseph.
They called on the departments that employed the fraudsters to pursue disciplinary action against them and for the social development department to monitor this.
They also asked Skweyiya to extend the investigation to the Eastern Cape, ”where the auditor general has repeatedly highlighted the problem of civil servants illegally drawing social grants”. — Sapa