REFILWE MEKOA
Free State municipalities lose money due to government employees who are registered as indigent.
This is according to the HOD of the provincial Department of Cooperative Governance and Human Settlements Victor Duma, during a parliamentary committee meeting on Wednesday in Bloemfontein. He said they have discovered this after going through various municipal indigent registers in the province. Duma explained that they are in contact with all affected municipalities and various departments advising on what steps to take.
“We have encouraged municipalities to remove those individuals from the indigent register and start processes of recovering the monies from them. There were some of the indigent registers that were compiled which were not authentic processes and no quality assurance,” he said.
Duma said most indigent records were processed by private companies and some cases the process made it easy for any individual who wouldn’t want to pay municipal services to register themselves being indigent.
“Now went that for every indigent application, the municipality must first check whether that certain person can afford or not afford. This is some of the assistance we offer municipalities so that they clear their indigent registers,” said Duma.
