The Special Investigating Unit (SIU) says it cannot declare whether anybody at the National Students Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) should be held responsible for acts identified in its probe into student finance.
According to SIU spokesman Kaizer Kganyago, investigations began in September. No one from NSFAS has been involved in the alleged payment of R5.1 billion to more than 40,000 students who did not qualify for bursaries.
Kganyago said:
We’re doing the investigation in stages, and right now, we’re looking at funding given to students and IT systems. We’re only six months into the investigation. “For now, we’ve not arrived at that stage. We don’t want to give the impression that there’s no collusion where NSFAS staff are concerned, but we’ve simply not arrived at that stage.
We need to go clinically to each and every one to understand what the issue is.
A key investigator who cannot be identified came before Parliament's Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) and stated that their investigation revealed that NSFAS made the payments between 2018 and 2021.
The investigator stated that they were tracking all pupils to identify them and determine when they no longer qualified for the bursary. “These are students whose household income is above R350,000 and therefore would not qualify for NSFAS funding based on the funding rules.
According to the investigator:
These students did not submit their parents’ details upon application and therefore awarded the bursary. We have interviewed several affected students and parents to obtain additional information.
Some students admitted that they did not qualify to receive the NSFAS funding, which we are currently pursuing, looking at the amount received by non-qualifying students.
The investigator added that 77 universities nationwide paid out R5.1 billion to 44,044 pupils who did not qualify.
The investigator discovered cases where certain schools or administrators conspired with students to mislead NSFAS.
We don’t have the number for now. Still, in terms of wilfully misled, there are some categories that we’ve identified that, in some instances, it’s students who obtain information from grandparents or uncles who don’t get enough money and in a few cases [university staff] have some role to play because they are the ones who submit the list to NSFAS...
The investigation is ongoing, we’ve identified some of them where we’re obtaining the application form to see who signed and who completed the application form so we can see who misled and we can see liability.
The probe is estimated to take 12 months to conclude.
According to the investigator, one of the findings was that NSFAS failed to establish and execute measures to guarantee yearly reconciliation between funds granted to institutions and monies allocated to students.
This control weakness led to overpayments and underpayments of funds to the different institutions for the period 2017 to date. In the past, it was difficult for the NSFAS to identify fraudulent applications for student loans or bursaries – as they did not have access to systems such as SA Revenue Service, home affairs, ITC, etc.
Inherent weaknesses and flaws in IT systems have prevailed. Systems are vulnerable and can be hacked with relative ease, resulting in the creation of fictitious students and payments being made to such fictitious students.
NSFAS board chairperson Ernest Khosa claimed that the financial scheme's CEO, Andile Nyongogo, had received threatening SMSes. At the same time, they attempted to resolve the matter with "mafia" landlords who would be cut out.
SOURCE: SowetanLive
