UIF commissioner bears the brunt for keeping Ters ship afloat
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It makes a great headline when a top government official is suspended, as was the case with Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) commissioner Teboho Maruping, who along with his top team has just been placed on so-called precautionary suspension.
Maruping was caught in the spotlight during an examination of the running of the largest SA business support scheme in living memory: the Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (Ters). The commissioner was in the (very) hot seat when the auditor-general issued his report into Covid-19 spending, just as the ANC was promising its latest corruption crackdown.
Yet, while there is a growing list of people in public life who may have committed fraud — or worse — during the pain of the pandemic, I find it hard to spot any obvious trace of criminality in the commissioner’s conduct. Over just a few months of the pandemic Ters will have distributed more than R40bn to keep on the payroll of companies that were in lockdown and unable to trade millions of workers who were therefore unable to work.
When the pandemic struck in March SA had a manual UIF system where each employee who wanted to claim benefits would have to fill in forms and stand in a queue. Typically, new IT systems are designed over months, and tested and retested with parallel test processing before going live. The UIF had no time to do any of that.
The choice was simple. Launch with a flawed system and fix it on the go, or build a perfect system and only then launch it. Yet the latter was not an option, pressure to launch the system and to get the payments flowing in April and May was enormous.
Another concern is that the UIF calculation methodology that was used was insanely complex for such a task. Why did we not just use a simple percentage of salary with a cap? The UIF methodology is just too complex for ordinary people to understand, be they the government, employers or employees.
I believe an incorrect decision was made upfront, with which the commissioner and his team had to live. The Ters rules were also changed in April and May, which introduced renewed uncertainty over who qualified. Should the rules not have been clear from the start?
Employment & labour minister Thulas Nxesi gave the UIF the task of disbursing the money, and then the UIF had to ...
Maruping was caught in the spotlight during an examination of the running of the largest SA business support scheme in living memory: the Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (Ters). The commissioner was in the (very) hot seat when the auditor-general issued his report into Covid-19 spending, just as the ANC was promising its latest corruption crackdown.
Yet, while there is a growing list of people in public life who may have committed fraud — or worse — during the pain of the pandemic, I find it hard to spot any obvious trace of criminality in the commissioner’s conduct. Over just a few months of the pandemic Ters will have distributed more than R40bn to keep on the payroll of companies that were in lockdown and unable to trade millions of workers who were therefore unable to work.
When the pandemic struck in March SA had a manual UIF system where each employee who wanted to claim benefits would have to fill in forms and stand in a queue. Typically, new IT systems are designed over months, and tested and retested with parallel test processing before going live. The UIF had no time to do any of that.
The choice was simple. Launch with a flawed system and fix it on the go, or build a perfect system and only then launch it. Yet the latter was not an option, pressure to launch the system and to get the payments flowing in April and May was enormous.
Another concern is that the UIF calculation methodology that was used was insanely complex for such a task. Why did we not just use a simple percentage of salary with a cap? The UIF methodology is just too complex for ordinary people to understand, be they the government, employers or employees.
I believe an incorrect decision was made upfront, with which the commissioner and his team had to live. The Ters rules were also changed in April and May, which introduced renewed uncertainty over who qualified. Should the rules not have been clear from the start?
Employment & labour minister Thulas Nxesi gave the UIF the task of disbursing the money, and then the UIF had to ...