Cape Town – The Department of Home Affairs will appoint a multidisciplinary task team to fully investigate all the anomalies found in the issuing of permits and visas.
This comes after the ministerial review committee found a host of irregularities in the issuance of permanent residence permits, business visas, corporate visas, critical skills visas, study visas, retired persons visas and citizenship by naturalisation between October 2004 and December 2020.
Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said the multidisciplinary task team would consist of experienced senior counsels, forensic investigators, data analysts and other related skills.
“The team will do a deep-dive investigation and may end up preparing dockets, develop plans to trace people, prepare documents for possible disciplinary committee, go to court to recover government documents obtained fraudulently and where appropriate trace people who need to be deported,” Motsoaledi said.
He also said the supply chain process to acquire the members of the soon-to-be-formed multidisciplinary task team was under way.
“In the meantime, some of the Home Affairs officials who have been fingered are already going through a disciplinary committee of other matters which are related to some of the findings of the review panel,” Motsoaledi said.
In March 2021, the minister announced a ministerial review committee led by former government director-general Dr Cassius Lubisi following a trend where prominent people were investigated by the department’s Counter Corruption Unit.
In its report, the ministerial review committee found that the systems of the department were not advanced enough to flag anomalies proactively.
The records for the period between 2004 and 2014 were not computerised and were still manual.
The review committee could only work with data from 2014 onwards.
In its investigation, the committee found that unscrupulous Home Affairs Department officials created fake users on the system and deliberately bypassed controls to manipulate visa and permit applications.
“The review found evidence of individuals who were actively manipulating visa and permit application with the assistance of corrupt Home Affairs officials. Some of these internal and external actors have been identified.”
The report said 12 officials who had petitioned Motsoaledi to stop the Counter Corruption Unit from investigating “their errors” were linked to a number of irregularities in the award of certain visas and permits.
“These matters are recommended to be further investigated by the multidisciplinary investigating team.”
According to the report, some permanent residence permits (PRPs) were approved before five years with no continuous period of residence.
“Spousal, dependants and relatives PRPs account for 80% of these approvals,” reads the report.
Some PRPs were approved though they were previously declined due to false documentation.
The report also said some applicants were naturalised before the five-year period after permanent residency was acquired without any special dispensation from the minister as required in law.
“Some were even naturalised before they received a PRP.”
Cape Times