Post Office CEO Mark Barnes will put up a fight with the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) when he appears on Tuesday at the social development committee and the standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) in parliament.
This is after Sassa dropped a bombshell on Monday, saying that the Post Office does not have the full capacity to take over social grant payments and replace incumbent Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) by March 2018.
Effectively, this means that the state-owned enterprise will not be the main paymaster to distribute more than R130bn in social grants to about 17m beneficiaries annually.
Barnes told Moneyweb that he would address the assertions made by Sassa during his Scopa appearance. He didn’t comment on the accuracy of Sassa’s assertions.
On Monday, social development minister Bathabile Dlamini said Sassa would initiate another tender procurement process, which will begin in November, to secure the social grant services that the Post Office is not capable of providing. This has raised fears that Sassa might not comply with the constitutional court’s order to phase out its current unlawful contact with CPS in the next five months.
The tender procurement process is expected to be completed by end-February 2018, making it unlikely to meet the court’s deadline for phasing CPS’s contract by 31 March 2018.
Sassa has already missed four self-imposed deadlines since August 2017 to sign the Post Office deal. The first report submitted to a panel of experts and the auditor-general — appointed by the constitutional court to oversee the phasing out of the CPS contract — said it’s possible that CPS may still be required for the payment of social grants beyond next year.
Dlamini said its due diligence investigation into the Post Office’s capacity to take over social grants revealed that it could only provide one of the four required services. The one service is the provision of an integrated payment system.
Required services
The other three required services were providing banking services (offering a prepaid debit card with a biometric data verification solution in line with the Payment Association of South Africa), card production capacity for social grant beneficiaries and the option of cash payments at pay points.
The Post Office’s request for proposal (or proposal for tender) was assessed by Sassa’s bid evaluation committee on the basis of the technical due diligence findings by the CSIR. Sassa made an initial social grant payment offer to the Post Office on 18 October.
“On the requirement to provide card production services, the bid evaluation process discovered that the Post Office can only produce 2.4m cards per annum as opposed to the minimum requirement of 4.2m stipulated on the request for proposal,” said Dlamini.
She also accused the Post Office of not disclosing to Sassa whether it would subcontract the services that it couldn’t fulfil in distributing social grants. “This omission resulted in the bid committee being unable to assess the capacity of the Post Office subcontractor, consequently making it impossible for Sassa to award the card body production element of the bid.”
Dlamini said the Post Bank did not have a full-fledged banking licence with the Reserve Bank and could have problems with online connectivity at many rural pay points. “It is a requirement that all banking solutions in South Africa should have online network connectivity for transacting purposes… The offline capability is, therefore, a prerequisite for any service provider to participate in the payment and distribution of social grants.”
The Post Office has more than 2 500 outlets across the country and operates Post Bank, which has 5.8m clients with savings accounts. Dlamini said more than 1 200 of the company’s outlets have less than 100sq m of operating space, making it impossible to expect its infrastructure to service millions of social grant beneficiaries.
Dlamini said the Post Office could still participate in the distribution of social grants, but it would have to supplement its current points of sale with new outlets. “This can be achieved in a very short space of time, through the deployment of ATMs and point-of-sale devices that provide cash back.”
- This article was originally published on Moneyweb and is used here with permission
