Agency gets flood of social grant disputes

1 June 2016

Cape Town - In April alone, the South African Social Services Agency (Sassa) received more than 23 000 disputes following possible unlawful deductions from social benefit grants.

The agency briefed the Western Cape Provincial Parliament earlier on Tuesday about the close to 19 000 disputes it had received between April 2015 and March 2016 from beneficiaries who claimed wrongful deductions.

Of the disputes, 451 were regarding funeral insurance, 618 for EFTs, 1 252 for electricity vouchers, 10 262 in connection with airtime vouchers and 6 224 about ATM withdrawals.

Sassa, which resorts under the national department of social development, told members of the Western Cape legislature that the fraudulent deductions are attributed to beneficiaries who received false Sassa forms allegedly issued by insurance brokers, which enabled them to fraudulently take out insurance on behalf of these beneficiaries.

In addition there were third parties who managed to obtain confidential details from beneficiaries that led to unauthorised and illegal withdrawals.

In the beginning of May, social development minister Bathabile Dlamini instructed Cash Payment Services (CPS), the company responsible for disbursing social grants to beneficiaries, to remove all debit order facilities from Sassa-branded cards.

Henceforth, no deductions are allowed to take place unless the grant holder gives written consent. Furthermore, such consent needs to be handed to a Sassa official in person.

Lorraine Botha, the DA’s Western Cape Spokesperson on Community Development, said in a statement that the dispute mechanisms that Sassa had put in place to handle disputes with illegal deductions were not working, judged by the high number of disputes reported.

“It remains to be seen if Sassa can put a stop to corrupt practices,” she said.

Meanwhile, Western Cape MEC for social development Albert Fritz said the dispute figures that Sassa reported did not reflect the true extent of the problem and that there were clearly under-reporting of cases.

This article first appeared on Fin24, see here.