Net 1 UEPS Technologies has received approximately R275-million (or $25,7-million) from the South African Social Security Agency (Sassa), related to the recovery of additional implementation costs incurred during the beneficiary re-registration process in the fiscal years of 2012 and 2013.
At the time, SASSA requested Net1 to biometrically register all social grant beneficiaries (including all child beneficiaries), in addition to the grant recipients who were issued with the SASSA-branded UEPS/EMV smart cards.
As a result, Net1 performed approximately 11-million additional registrations that did not form part of its monthly service fee. After an independent verification process, SASSA agreed to pay the R275-million as full settlement of the additional costs incurred.
The decision to re-register all 21-million social grant beneficiaries has enabled SASSA, through the use of Net1’s biometric search engine and data analysis tools, to identify and remove any duplicate, invalid and non-existent grant recipients from the grant system.
The saving to the South African fiscus to date amounts to approximately R3-billion per annum due to the elimination of these grants.
