Illegal SASSA deductions

During a response to a written parliamentary question on illegal SASSA deductions, the Minister of Social Development replied that since she banned the deductions in May 2016, her Department has received 44 142 complaints about ongoing deductions. 38 357 were since resolved  and blocked not to allow any further deductions from recurring and 5 785 of these cases have been  refunded to the beneficiaries. The nature of the complaints is airtime, electricity and loan deductions. The Minister added that SASSA developed and implemented a Dispute Resolution Mechanism as a recourse system to deal with the rising number of deductions against social grants. The Dispute Resolution Mechanism has a built-in Communication Strategy that focuses on beneficiary education and awareness. In addition to this system, a Ministerial Task Team was established to play a monitoring, oversight and also propose interventions to deal with this challenge. This system has since reflected and improvement in dealing with this.