THE South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) has set the record straight about the reports that 74 000 dead recipients were wrongly paid.
This comes after Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu said at least a payment of R140m in Sassa grants had been "wrongly paid" to more than 70 000 beneficiaries who had died over the past three years.
She revealed this on Thursday, 11 January, in a written reply to a Parliamentary question by the Democratic Alliance’s Jacques Smalle.
However, Sassa swiftly amended the comments made by Zulu, claiming not all the 74 000 deceased recipients were ghost accounts.
“As much as we are aware of some corrupt activities taking place, which our fraud and compliance unit is dealing with daily, as Sassa, we can confirm that the majority of this is not due to corruption but rather due to timing of reporting of death by the responsible family members vs the date on which Sassa extracts payments for the affected clients,” Sassa spokesman Paseka Letsatsi said.
According to Letsatsi, the 74 000 deceased beneficiaries as reported is actually a number of beneficiaries who were reported to have died in the past three years.
This means that of the 18 million clients paid monthly by Sassa, there's an average of 2 055 clients who died monthly in the past three years whose circumstances could have been reporting the deceased late at Sassa or Home Affairs.
Letsatsi said every month, and they test if the beneficiaries are still alive or dead by comparing Sassa extracts payment beneficiary details with Home Affairs.
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According to Lesatsi, this process takes place around the 22nd or 23rd of every month.
In the instance that the client is found to be deceased, she said such a record is deactivated on the Sassa system before the extraction of payment, and no money is generated for such clients.
However, the problem now comes when a family reports the death of a person late, causing money to be released prematurely.
“In instances where death is reported late at Sassa or Department of Home Affairs, such eventuality can result in some payment being prematurely released of which they have no control.
“There are instances where death is reported after several days from the actual date on which death would have occurred – this late reporting of death to the Department of Home Affairs or to Sassa results in exceptions for monies released prematurely,” Letsatsi said.
With Sassa corruption scandals on the rise, Letsatsi said the fund is working tirelessly with Home Affairs to ensure the systems are connected. This is to ensure that we stop corruption.
