Although there is uproar over a “dysfunctional” R300 million software solution provided to the Compensation Fund by German software giant SAP, Parliament believes the solution will come in handy in rooting out corruption at the entity.
The Compensation Fund, an entity of the Department of Labour and Employment, last week admitted suffering teething problems in its implementation of the SAP solution called CompEasy (S4i).
The software solution is being blamed for the collapse of the department’s R60 billion Compensation Fund for injured workers across South Africa.
Last week, the Compensation Fund appeared before the Portfolio Committee on Labour and Employment to table its second quarter report for the current financial year.
The report reflected the challenges the fund is addressing and which are systemic in nature, and due to those problems, the fund has migrated from uMehluko to a new system called CompEasy, a product of SAP.
Crisis mode
The parliamentary committee says although the fund acknowledges the teething problems in the new system, efforts are being made to ensure claims are processed and paid on time.
The committee was informed there are service providers that have not been paid for six months, and that threatens the closure of their businesses.
ITWeb last week reported that newly-formed advocacy group – the Injured Workers Action Group (IWAG) – is alleging workers from across SA, who have been injured on duty, are facing “a crisis of epic proportions” as a result of the technological collapse of the Compensation Fund that is legally mandated to cover their medical bills and disability pensions.
According to IWAG spokesperson, Tim Hughes, the SAP system should have been live since 1 October 2019, but CompEasy was “dead on arrival”.
“The Web site never worked. The system was never parallel-tested with the old one as you would expect when the stakes are this high,” said Hughes.
“As a result, about 150 000 working-class South Africans who have been injured or disabled on duty since mid-2019 have been left out in the cold. And to make matters worse, the state granted a R300 million tender plus five years of maintenance fees to Britehouse, a division of Dimension Data, to implement this SAP-based system that is not working.”
Although SAP acknowledged the Compensation Fund is running the company’s software product, the company said it did not implement the system.
The implementer, Britehouse, told ITWeb the system “is operational and processing claims and the number of claims processed continues to increase daily”.
Britehouse’s parent company Dimension Data has global strategic partnerships with SAP in all countries in the world and across many verticals.
Case by case complaints
The parliamentary committee says the labour department, through minister Thulas Nxesi, committed to ensuring the new system is working properly for the benefit of the workers who are injured on duty to be compensated in time, and also to ensure the system is not corrupted.
The minister committed his office and the department to address all the complaints from the service providers to be addressed on a case by case basis.
The committee says it will undertake an oversight visit to the fund in order to have a better understanding of the new claims systems.
It says it is satisfied with the briefing it got from the fund regarding the new challenges that riddled the new system.
“The committee is happy with the successful migration of the fund which it believes elimination of corruption and fraud from the claims process will be thoroughly addressed,” the committee says.
“We hope the claims will be attended to on time without causing frustration among service providers, but importantly, the ordinary workers who are injured in the workplace, and who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of the fund’s services,” said the chairperson of the committee, Lindelwa Dunjwa.
Problem resolution
Meanwhile, IOL reports that minister Nxesi has proposed that healthcare professionals representing tens of thousands of injured workers who have been unable to access funding to pay for their medical expenses should meet with the Compensation Fund to resolve the problem.
It says DA Member of Parliament and labour lawyer, Michael Bagraim, who had raised the problem after receiving multiple complaints, said Nxesi had told the committee meeting that 80% of claims had been paid, and that “fraudulent claims” and “incomplete paperwork” were to blame for the non-payment of claims.
However, according to IOL, Hughes said: “There was no acknowledgement of the quantum and extent of the structural problems of the system.”
He added that Nxesi’s concern about fraud was “alarmist”, and if anything, he said, fraud would not be linked to external stakeholders but to the fund and its employees, says the publication.
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