Hon member, since
2016, public service employees are prohibited ... strictly prohibited from conducting business with the state. The Department of Public Service and Administration adopted the following mechanisms to detect public servants who do business with the state.
Firstly, we effected changes to the personnel salary system - that's Persal - to allow departments to capture on their own requests from employees to perform other remunerative work on it. This data captured on Persal is analysed and compared with information on the disclosure system to detect possible cases of employees conducting business with the state. That's the first thing enabling all departments across to detect.
Number two, information is extracted from the central supplier database which contains a register of all individuals registered to tender for business with the state, and this is maintained by National Treasury. The data is analysed and compared to the data of Persal so as to indentify public service employees who are doing business with the state.
This is proving to be quite effective in terms of results.
The Department of Public Service and Administration directed letters to departments identifying names of employees possibly conducting business with the state and encouraging departments to, among other things, confirm that the identified individuals were indeed conducting business with the state, to take action when it had to, and to report the steps taken against culprits to the Department of Public Service and Administration.
The Department of Public Service and Administration also increased awareness of the detection of employees conducting business with the state among ethics officers of the various departments by means of hosting an annual national ethics forum.
At the end of February this year, the Department of Public Service and Administration identified 1 080 public service employees who were possibly conducting business with the state. We did this by comparing information contained in the Central Supplier Database with that contained in Persal as we have indicated. The Department of Public Service and Administration is in the process of scrutinising the names list with the assistance of the relevant departments, using the same instrument so as to eliminate names of employees who left the public service, those who were wrongly flagged and those appointed in an official capacity to represent government. From this process then the names of 20 employees likely to be conducting business with the state were identified. On 24 June this year those names were handed over to the SA Police Service, SAPS, for investigation.
On 2 September 2019, SAPS and the Department of Public Service and Administration convened a meeting to discuss progress with the cases and it was resolved that the National Prosecuting Authority, NPA, will be included in the next meeting to develop prosecution strategies.
The Department of Public Service and Administration is also in the process of completing another 20 names of employees to be handed over to SAPS.
So, it is working and as we experience more of this mechanism ... more and more, if there are any out there, they will be caught and brought to justice.
Question 131: