Lungu elihloniphekile, Nk S P Kopane ... [hon member Mrs S P Kopane ... the South African Social Security Agency, Sassa, developed and is implementing the integrity model as a strategy to detect and prevent fraud in the grants administration system. The strategy focuses on compliance, enforcement, confirmation of eligibility to document review and the life verification of social grant beneficiaries for existence. The model further requires Sassa to link fraudulent beneficiaries to the staff members who captured and approved these grants on the system. The integrity policy was developed and is being consulted with organised labour. The policy will allow Sassa to conduct a lifestyle audit on officials suspected to be living beyond their means. Furthermore, the policy will enable Sassa to take corrective action in cases of omission or commission caused deliberately or through negligence.
Sassa is also implementing an ethics programme, which primarily focuses on ethics audits. The audits include reconciliation between financial disclosure, remuneration for work and declaration of gifts. These will assist Sassa in determining conflicts of interest relating to its staff members, which could undermine its integrity.
The compliance and fraud management function within Sassa is responsible for fraud detection, investigation of fraudulent grants, in co-operation with law enforcement agencies, and verification of grants for validity and existence of beneficiaries. Sassa is gradually increasing its capacity to effectively reform the above-mentioned functions. In addition, Sassa has also enhanced its fraud prevention measures through the implementation of Industrial Control Technology, ICT, controls to manage access to its systems.
With regard to the second question, the Compliance and Fraud Management Department is responsible for data interrogation to detect fraudulent grants. Sassa is implementing the benefits verification process to verify the validity of grants, eligibility of beneficiaries and physical verification of the existence of beneficiaries. The identified cases are subsequently terminated from the system and referred to law enforcement agencies for criminal investigation, prosecution and the recovery of fraudulently paid grants.
With regard to the third question, the answer is yes. The following steps have been taken to ensure that the social pension system, Socpen, and data integrity are maintained. Access to the system is controlled by the resource access control facility, which ensures that only registered users have access to the system and data under controlled circumstances. Two user- account management policies have been approved and implemented and a system model manages and controls access to the application. A batch interface with the population register of the Department of Home Affairs is run before the grant payments are extracted to prevent illegal beneficiaries. Strict monitoring of access to the Socpen system after business hours and over weekends is performed. Exception reports on anomalies on the Socpen system are produced for investigation. Lastly, the batch interface with the government payroll system has been implemented to ensure that government officials do not benefit from social assistance.
Furthermore, Sassa will be implementing a biometric identification project during the 2011-12 financial year to further improve Socpen system information access and control. Thank you.