The department of home affairs says it has noted with concern media reports alleging that minister Malusi Gigaba had intentionally misled the nation by implying that no fraud or corruption had been detected during the roll out of the smart identity card.
The department said the misleading reports deliberately intended to misrepresent a presentation made to the home affairs parliamentary committee by Gauteng provincial manager Albert Matsaung.
In his presentation, Matsaung clarified that the fraudulent instances he had alluded to had occurred during applications for green barcoded ID documents and not during applications for smart ID cards.
Home affairs in Gauteng has implemented a strategy at its smart card offices to confirm and verify before going through the smart card process.
“The process has been implemented to clean up the national population register due to previous cases where non-South African citizens found their way into the system and acquired green barcoded IDs fraudulently,” said the department on Wednesday.
The verification process is delegated to front offices at submission and collection with the assistance of immigration officers.
“Since the implementation of the strategy, various offices identified suspected cases where green barcoded IDs that had been fraudulently acquired were used to apply for smart ID cards.
“However, due to the tightened security measures, which include the submission of biometrics during the collection phase, the applicants failed to collect their documents upon request to appear at offices of application,” the department said.
The Byron’s Place office in Pretoria retrieved one card where the applicant failed to confirm her nationality and thus the document could not be issued, the Harrison Street office in Johannesburg has handed over 64 cases of suspected fraud to counter corruption unit for investigations and the Vanderbjilpark office identified two smart ID card applications by a Zimbabwean couple who failed to fulfil set security requirements.
The department said the introduction of the smart ID card remains the best solution to challenges that were experienced previously through the manipulation of the application processes for the green barcoded ID book. — SAnews