House Not In Order

19 June 2006

IT IS inevitable that when the state is dishing out cash, whether in the form of pensions or housing subsidies, there will be a good few who will try to claim some of the cash by fraud and corruption.
And many of those are bound to be public servants who abuse their positions to defraud the system.
Rooting out that fraud and corruption, and putting systems in place to ensure the cash is dispensed only to legitimate claimants, is a huge and constant challenge for the government departments concerned. And there are striking, and disturbing contrasts in the way different departments go about tackling the rot, when it’s found.
Contrast that with the rather nonchalant attitude at the housing department, which was lambasted by Parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) last week for doing little or nothing to prevent millions of rand worth of housing subsidies being wasted on the wrong people. Scopa called hearings intervened after auditor-general Shauket Fakie reported to Parliament at the beginning of this year that provincial housing departments approved R323m of “irregular” housing subsidies between 1995 and 2004, involving more than 50000 beneficiaries. Fakie found more than 7000 government employees receiving housing subsidies to which they were not entitled. Large sums were also paid out to dead people, children and those who already owned houses. And the auditor-general’s report pointed to severe deficiencies in the housing-subsidy system, which was able neither to detect nor to control the irregularities.
Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu set up a committee several months ago to tackle the problem. But Scopa discovered last week that the committee met only once, and would complete its work only by the end of this year. And there is still no strategy to install systems that would prevent illegal transactions, with provincial officials still having the ability to override objections to applications that the system throws up. Scopa committee members described the system as “designed for corruption”. And they objected to the contempt with which the housing department appeared to be treating Parliament — and the corruption problem itself.
The ministry has tried to place some of the blame on the fact that the housing department lacked a director-general until recently. But this is hardly an excuse. The housing department seems not only to have little grasp of just what is happening with the subsidy scheme, but even less of a clear notion of how it’s going to tackle the problems Fakie has identified, which may be only the tip of the iceberg. And what’s particularly worrying is it doesn’t seem to be nearly worried enough.
This is a department that is set to get a lot more money from the fiscus over the next few years, with the housing and human-settlement grant budgeted to increase from just under R5bn now to R8,7bn in three years’ time. As it is, Sisulu’s new housing policy has yet to prove that it can deliver housing at the kind of scale that SA needs if it is to start cutting the housing backlog, which is estimated to have risen to about 2,5-million units.
The very least that the policy can do is to ensure that the subsidy reaches the poor, not the crooks.

Source: Business Day

« back