Parliament, Friday, 30 October 2020 – The Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) joined by the Portfolio Committee on Employment and Labour today conducted an oversight visit to the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF).

Scopa is concerned with the lack of human capacity at UIF, particularly at the call centre, which is where e-mails, online applications and calls from the public are processed. Scopa was informed that the call centre currently has a backlog of 444 000 e-mails from the public with only eight call centre agents to attend to those e-mails. It gets an average of 30 000 calls a day, but can only attend to 3 000 of those calls. This has a negative outcome on service delivery and on everyone that requires services from the UIF.

The committee believes there should be a special focus on the information and communication technology (ICT) department, which is responsible for the UIF’s system and which contributed to the UIF disbursing Covid-19 funds to deceased people, inmates, members of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) beneficiaries, National Students Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) beneficiaries, foreign nationals without working permits, and public servants including UIF employees.

It is also disturbing to note that the consulting company responsible for the development of the same system could not respond to questions about weaknesses in the system. The committee wants the Department of Employment and Labour to investigate obtaining an integrated database system with other departments to avoid the kind of corruption that has happened as a result of these weaknesses.

Scopa welcomes the consequence management process that the Minister of Employment and Labour has undertaken in response to the corruption and irregularities that have occurred at the UIF. Scopa remains concerned with the challenges plaguing the UIF, as it is clear that the issues run deep and date to a period before Covid-19. The pandemic has simply exposed pre-existing weaknesses.

ISSUED BY THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMUNICATION SERVICES ON BEHALF OF THE CHAIRPERSON OF SCOPA, MR MKHULEKO HLENGWA.

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