Cape Town - The Pay the Grants movement said it was alarmed that six months into the new iteration of the Social Relief of Distress grant, millions of potential claimants are still unable to get their applications approved – or get their money as promised.
The movement said the crisis won't end until Sassa and the Social Development department take accountability and fix the exclusionary criteria of the grant, and their administrative errors.
The movement is concerned about the pending applications, rejection of applications due to “Alternative source of income” and UIF, as well as the use of bank verification and the use of databases such as UIF, Sars and NSFAS, which it said continued to prove to be an impediment, six months after the new grant dispensation. It said these were continuing despite constant reporting to Sassa and the department.
Pay the Grants co-ordinator Melanie McKernan said statistics released by Sassa were questionable, as countless people had still not received cash-in-hand due to the bank verification delays. She said the Cash Send system was still not up and running and that there were still obstacles being encountered by claimants at Postbank and retail stores.
She said countless beneficiaries were yet to receive their July and August application status as they were still waiting for it to change from “pending” since April. She said this was concerning as it meant the backlog was growing daily.
McKernan said there was no clear distinction made between an income and help or money received and that appeals approved on reconsideration from the old SRD period were still not completed and paid out.
She said they doubted the recently gazetted changes to the income threshold would have enough impact on the number of unfair declines, due to the removal of the bank verification as the “final determination” for means testing.
Sassa spokesperson Paseka Letsatsi said the agency had experienced slight delays and challenges with assessments for the month of July due to the previous regulations requiring people to reconfirm their grants every three months. He said consequently, a low number of people re-confirmed their grants.
Letsatsi said the agency was hopeful that a greater number of qualifying applicants would now have access to the grant after the recently published regulations, which include the increase of the income threshold for the means test from R350 to R624.
He said already, at the beginning of August, Sassa had received just under 12 million applications.