Billions of rands have been paid out to students who weren’t eligible to receive funds from the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS), reports The Citizen.

This is according to the SIU, which launched its NSFAS investigation into alleged corruption, maladministration, the allocation of loans, bursaries and any other funding payable to students in September last year.

Briefing Parliament’s Scopa, the SIU’s chief national investigations officer Leonard Lekgetho indicated that the unit estimates that the probe would take approximately 18 months to complete. Lekgetho said some students were awarded the bursary despite not submitting their parent’s details when applying.

Only students whose annual household income is under R350 000 qualify to receive funding.

‘We have interviewed several affected students and parents to obtain addition information. Some students admitted that they did not qualify to receive the NSFAS funding,’ the SIU official explained to the committee.

He revealed that R5.1bn has been paid out to just over 40 000 non-qualifying students across 76 tertiary institutions in the country.

Lekgetho also said it was, however, too early into its investigations to point out the specific flaws and weakness identified in NSFAS IT and financial management systems as well as in procurement related matters. 

Letgetho also told Parliament that NSFAS had failed to come up with and implement measures to ensure that the funds paid to the institutions matched the allocation of funds to students.

This failure led to overpayments and underpayments to the different institutions from 2017 to date.

‘However, they have recently appointed a service provider to assist them perform this reconciliation in a process called close out reporting.’

At this stage, only three institutions in Mpumalanga and Western Cape have deposited R38.8m into the SIU’s trust account that was due to NSFAS as a result of overpayment.

Other institutions are still being verified to identify whether they owe NSFAS or vice versa, according to Letgetho. He further revealed that the SIU has observed that it was difficult for NSFAS to identify fraudulent applications for student loans or bursaries in the past, because the agency did not have access to SARS and the Department of Home Affairs.

Meanwhile, SIU CEO Andy Mothibi highlighted some of the challenges faced by the unit during its investigation, reports The Citizen.

This included the lack of co-operation from relevant officials and destruction or loss of relevant documents. The intimidation of witnesses was another risk, as well as whether the defendants would be able to pay for civil recoveries.

Full report in The Citizen

See also full Business Day report