SOUTH Africa has clawed back almost 3.4 billion rand ($228 million) of irregularly paid COVID-19 jobless claims in an ongoing investigation into corruption linked to relief funds, the auditor general said on Wednesday.
The TERS payments, a special jobless grant administered by the government’s Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), was introduced to provide between 38% and 60% of the salary of employees laid off directly as a result of the pandemic.
But the national audit office found that parts of the 500 billion rand pandemic relief package had been exposed to varying scales of fraud, angering the public at a time of record unemployment and an economic recession pre-dating the pandemic.
In September the regulator said its tiered investigation had identified around 145 billion rand of expenditure, meant for relief programs like unemployment and poverty grants, showing “indicators of a higher risk of fraud”.
In response to the audit and its
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