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Two first-year computer science students at Stellenbosch University have uncovered massive fraud in the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant administered by SASSA.

After discovering that their and their friends’ R370 awards were being stolen, they dug a little deeper and uncovered a bank account opened in one of their names that had been receiving the grant on a monthly basis.

The students, Joel Cedras and Veer Gosai told GroundUp that fraudsters use unsuspecting citizens’ identity numbers to apply for the SRD grant and receive the funds in bank accounts they have set up using the same ID numbers.

“We had to call some banks, and eventually we found a bank account with my name, and they were receiving my R370 grant every month.”

Digging even deeper, Cedras and Gosai accessed SASSA’s application programming interface (API) for February 2005. The researchers discovered that approximately 75,000 SRD grant applications were submitted for persons born in February 2005. There were around 82,100 births that month, resulting in an application rate of roughly 91%.

“That’s a very high amount that over 90% of people born in that month had an active SASSA application,” Gosai said.

This suggests that not only are fraudulent applications being filed to SASSA, but many of them are likely to succeed.

MyBroadband reports that the two students also conducted an on-campus survey of 60 other students they knew. Of the 60 respondents, 58 had active SRD grant applications, of which only two said they had applied for the grant themselves.

The students went public with the results, with their statements published in several media outlets.

“We believe it is right to then go public with what we find immediately.”

“When we uncovered the problems described here, we did try to alert Sassa but found it near-impossible to get hold of anyone. Most of the contact numbers listed on its website either do not exist, or ring indefinitely.”

SASSA grant admission head Brenton van Vrede admitted to Heart FM that the organisation’s grants system had been breached.

“We do, unfortunately, have quite a lot of these cases,” said Van Vrede.

“Some of the criminals have been apprehended. My personal view, though, is that it is at a very low level. We do think there’s a bigger operation behind this.”

He stated that SASSA had discovered that three banks were not properly executing the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (Fica), allowing fraudsters to register bank accounts using other people’s ID numbers.

Cedras and Gosai recommend the entire SASSA SRD system needs to be re-envisioned, and that SASSA not only reverify every single grant application but that it also requests additional details to verify.

“Alternately, it needs to reimplement the system from scratch – though this would be a huge undertaking that would likely leave many SRD recipients out of pocket.”

The pair are now demanding answers from SASSA – and they are not alone.

Whatever the fallout from Cedras and Gosai’s findings may be, can we at least agree that the offending banks should pay for their studies in full?

[source:mybroadband&groundup]