Strategic Management

The inadequacies of some parts of the system used by SASSA to distribute grants make it possible for unethical members of the society to defraud the systems. In the Easter Cape, for example, five people were found to have been using iimbombozi for more than five years to get grants from the government. In most of these cases, iimbombozi emerge after a child dies. According to the system currently in use by sassa, no checks are done for deceased beneficiaries of the grants. Recipients or members of the family are expected report to sassa in person after the beneficiary has passed on so that sassa can then take them off their system. If no one goes to cancel the grants, sassa remains uninformed of the deceased and keep on depositing money into their accounts. Parents of the deceased child would then withdraw the money from the account every month and use it for whatever purpose as they wish; and this would continue like that until some honest members of the public decide to report this perpetrators. Another insufficient part of the system is with regard to the background checks for changes in income levels of the recipients. According to the system in use, parents are required to report directly to sassa when their income increase so that if it exceeds the minimum level, then their children can stop earning grants. Apperently very few people do report their grand; and many continue to earn these monies wrongfully. The only time where sassa is able to trace the incease in income is when the parent starts to work for the government. No checks are done for people working in the public sector.

Integrity within sassa offices remains a question on hold. Every year reports show that those members of the public who defraud the system do so in collaboration with officials from within the agency. An interesting case, among many others, is that of Thembisa, a small town north of Gauteng, where some deserving recipients of the grant were found to have been enjoying only about...