Cape Town - The lifeline of the poor, the SA Social Security Agency (Sassa), has haemorrhaged more than R500 million to government officials’ theft, corruption and fraud in the past decade – with little to no accountability.
In a parliamentary reply, Social Development Minister Lindiwe Zulu totalled the cost of theft, corruption, mismanagement, irregular payments, system outages, cyberattacks, system glitches and card duplication to R536 million since the 2012/13 financial year.
The department has sanctioned 445 officials for wrongdoing, Zulu revealed.
Zulu said no official accounted for the loss of R16.8 million for 2012/13.
Sassa lost R109.9 million in 2013/14, with only two officials being fired for the loss.
The department’s investigators upped the ante for losses made in the 2021/22 financial year, with 108 officials charged and found guilty for Sassa’s losses.
A department official told the Cape Argus it was impossible to speak to Zulu over the phone yesterday as she was attending to a Finland delegation.
In a recent reply to a question from the DA social development spokesperson, Bridget Masango, about measures to stem the fraud, Zulu said Sassa and the department had adopted a zero-tolerance stance on fraud and corruption.
She said the department had boosted its information communication and technology capabilities to bolster prevention.
In a previous parliamentary reply, dated January this year and addressed to IFP MP Liezl van der Merwe, Zulu said that of the more than 200 Sassa officials who fraudulently accessed the social relief of distress grants, only one had been dismissed and the majority were still employed.
In that reply, Zulu said 221 officials were probed for double dipping into the R350 grant funds, with 208 officials still employed by Sassa.
Zulu said at the time the alleged transgressions relating to SRD grants, committed by the officials, numbered 761 financial misconduct cases, which related to the failure by the affected officials to prevent the occurrence of irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure and damages and losses within Sassa.