New scam

Fraudsters are going after the State's special pensions, which are paid to people 'who made sacrifices or served the public interest to establish a non-racial democracy in South Africa'

Fraudsters are creating fake biographies to get access to the state’s special pensions, MPs heard in Parliament on Thursday.

Kabelo Jonathan, the senior manager of special pensions at the Treasury, told the standing committee on finance that 141 applications for pensions had been falsely submitted and approved by the special pensions board.

“There are a number of potential fraud and corruption cases that have been identified where biographies have been fabricated,” he said. “These cases are at various stages of investigation.”   

The pensions were paid to people who made sacrifices or served the public interest “to establish a non-racial democracy in South Africa”.    

Treasury officials were unable to give an estimate on the scale of the fraud, but it was estimated to run into millions of rands.

The special pension budget is between R200 million and R300m a year.

Jonathan said the 141 had been taken to prosecutors at the Commercial Crimes Court, while another 18 new cases were being investigated by the Hawks.

Two workers in the special pensions department had been dismissed for fraud. One other had been suspended.

“The Hawks have a dedicated team that are assisting us with the investigations,” said Jonathan.

He said the department had achieved a number of successes in the  past year. It had processed 7,185 of 9,924 applications for pensions between January 2009 and 31 December 2010.

Of these, 3,440 had been rejected.

In total, 21,277 applications for special pensions have been granted.

Committee chairman Thabadiawa Mufamadi said paying out special pensions was often difficult.

“The nature of the struggle was that it did not allow people to have records,” he said.

“It was risky to keep documents and so we had many unlisted soldiers.”