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Two Parliamentary Committees have expressed concern about the state of affairs at the Unemployment Insurance Fund.
Oversight visits were conducted on Friday by the Standing Committees on Public Accounts and Employment and Labour.
They said afterwards that they were concerned at the lack of human capacity at the UIF, particularly at its call centre.
Scopa said it was informed that the call centre currently has a backlog of 444 000 e-mails from the public with only eight call centre agents to attend to those e-mails.
“It also gets an average of 30 000 calls a day, but can only attend to 3 000 of those calls,” said Scopa chairperson, Mkhululeko Hlengwa.
He said the Committee welcomed the actions announced by the Minister of Employment and Labour, Thulas Nxesi, in response to the corruption and irregularities that have occurred at the UIF.
“Scopa remains concerned with the challenges plaguing the UIF, as it is clear that the issues run deep and date to a period before Covid-19. The pandemic has simply exposed pre-existing weaknesses,” he said.
