The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA) welcomes the instruction from SCOPA that forced SASSA and SAPO to finalize a deal for the distribution of grants to over 17 million South Africans

“OUTA believes that Minister Bathabile Dlamini continuously threaten the most vulnerable people in the country’s ability to put food on the table in her continued efforts to derail the process by enabling Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) to be the only viable option to distribute the social grants,” says Dominique Msibi, Portfolio Manager of Social Services and Special Projects at OUTA.

OUTA emphasized its relief following the instruction from SCOPA. “This process should not include companies like CPS and Net1 who have been milking the South African economy of millions of rand in unwarranted service charges,” Msibi said.

Msibi believes the intergovernmental partnership between SASSA and SAPO will save the state significant amounts of money which have so far been spent wastefully to maintain a contract with CPS. “This contract was ruled by the Constitutional Court to be irregular last year already. SCOPA ensured that this matter moved forward swiftly and that Minister Bathabile Dlamini could no longer hide behind her department’s officials or evade her oversight responsibility. We now want to see the Minister be held accountable for her misconduct.”

OUTA says that there is still a lot of wrongs in the management of the Department and that there is still the reality of grant recipients who lose money they can ill afford, due to unauthorized deductions. “We hope that SAPO, together with SASSA, will clean up the grant recipient data base and block whatever mechanism has so far been used to access recipients’ accounts,” Msibi added.

 

Issued by OUTA