LISTEN: Students who exposed SASSA system tell MPs ‘overhaul’ needed
Two university students who exposed possible fraud in the Social Relief of Distress Grant have told Parliament they believe the system needs to be overhauled.
Veer Gosai and Joel Cedras are first-year Computer Science students at Stellenbosch University.
"It seems like there are too many applications that are being made without people's knowledge, and we feel it would be too difficult for SASSA to detect all these fraudulent applications," Cedras told MPs on the social development committee on Wednesday.
Gosai added, "Currently, all you have to provide is your full name, surname, and ID number to apply for an SRD application. This is not enough. We think that by working with Home Affairs, SASSA can improve its systems by adding more validation that would leave fraudsters unable to create applications on people's names."
The duo said they discovered fraud in the application process for the R370 SRD grant that was introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Gosai and Cedras published their findings in GroundUp last week.
READ: Calls to restructure economy, reduce grant dependency
The pair tried to apply for the grant but found that their ID numbers were already in use on the system.
They then conducted a survey among fellow students on campus and found that 56 out of 60, or 93 per cent, had an active SRD grant profile that they had never applied for.
It has since been continued.
Gosai told the committee that their investigation did not stop there.
"We received a positive impact from the public SASSA system that there were 74,931 active applications for people born in February 2005. From Stats SA we were told that were 82 097 people born for that year. That correlated to an application rate of just over 91 per cent - highly unlikely when you look at youth unemployment which is around 60.8 per cent."
LISTEN:
Last month, the South African Social Security Agency revealed that it received around 17 million applications for the SRD grant in September alone.
Social Development Minister Sisisi Tolashe was also invited to listen to the student's presentation and respond.
Tolashe said they take the allegations seriously.
"Neither SASSA nor the department have been favoured with the research that the students have undertaken. They also have not acceded to several requests to come and present their findings. I have directed SASSA to investigate the matter. In the absence of reliable information from the source of the allegations, SASSA has not been able to complete its investigation."
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