The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) still has no plan in place to take over the distribution of social grants when the contract with the current service provider, Cash Paymaster Serivces (CPS), comes to an end in 2018.
According to Business Day on Wednesday, Sassa's chief financial officer Tsakeriwa Chauke made the admission in Parliament on Monday. The agency appeared before Parliament's standing committee on public accounts to give the portfolio committee an update on its plans to take over the contract.
The CPS contract was extended by the Constitutional Court until April 2018.
Sassa CEO Thokozani Magwaza reportedly told MPs on Tuesday:
"We will have a workshop with the Post Office tomorrow [Wednesday] where we will ascertain the services that they can offer us. We want to develop a build, operate and transfer system that will help us to take over the full stock of what is supposed to happen," he reportedly said.
Business Day reported that he later admitted the agency still had to establish how to move the data on beneficiaries from CPS to Sassa or a new supplier.
Chauke reportedly said:
"The 17-million beneficiaries are from our own information system. The set of data we don't have is customer master data, which CPS has. That needs to be migrated. It has always been the property of Sassa, but was held ... [by] CPS.
"We are going to migrate it and the transactional data. We will start the migration in October. At the end of January, it will be completely migrated
Chairman committee chairperson Themba Godi reportedly gave Sassa two weeks to provide the committee with a complete strategic plan.