Sorry no blog yesterday people - thanks to Telkom and an ADSL line that would not work!
Now to the business at hand - can you really see anyone coming forward and saying 'Please sir, I de-frauded the housing subsidy by accepting one and not meeting the criteria to actually qualify for one! " Yeah right! Money is being spent and stolen left right and centre and no-one seems to give a damn!
Minister aims to deliver 500 000 houses by 2008
December 22, 2006
By Roy Cokayne
Pretoria - Housing minister Lindiwe Sisulu aims to have 500 000 low-cost housing units in blocked provincial housing projects completed by the beginning of 2008. Sisulu said the units were at various stages of development and the housing department was negotiating a funding mechanism to allow for their once-off completion by having them project-managed by Thubelisha, a parastatal linked to the housing department."In this way, we could complete all the blocked projects within one year. We've assessed and are attending to the legal problems, and next year we'll be starting. We aim to have them completed by the beginning of 2008," she said.
Earlier this month, an audit commissioned by the nine provincial housing departments, and verified by the national department, found that 346 housing projects across the country, valued at R2.36 billion, had been blocked between 1995 and last year. Sisulu said the blocked projects resulted from two major problems: emerging contractors not having the necessary capacity or knowledge, and some municipalities not having the capacity to manage projects in their care. Sisulu said the government would deal with the municipal capacity problems while court processes would deal with developers who were in contravention of agreements. "We don't want contractors to get away with tardy work. It would be a sad indictment on us if we do," she said.
On the proposed amnesty intended to deal with housing subsidy fraud within the housing department, Sisulu said the department would encourage people to come forward because the monitoring and law enforcement mechanisms could be quite laborious. Sisulu added that the proposed amnesty would enable the state to recover money that had been fraudulently obtained and hopefully also gain insight into how the perpetrators were able to defraud the state. Earlier this year, auditor-general Shauket Fakie released a damning report on the housing subsidy system, claiming that in some instances it did not accurately record beneficiaries and was open to abuse. The report said more than R2.5 billion had been handed out in the subsidy scheme between 1994 and 2004, and it identified irregular applications involving R323 million.
Sisulu said she was unaware of any housing subsidy fraud cases since 2004, despite the housing department creating a special investigations unit, which was being assisted by auditing firm KPMG and the asset forfeiture unit, to follow up leads on housing fraud scams, find any perpetrators and plug gaps created by department officials. She said this initiative had not achieved as much success in uncovering internal fraud as was hoped for because the asset forfeiture unit was weighed down by other cases.
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