- Sassa says reviews and eLife certification do not aim to end grants arbitrarily, but to confirm beneficiaries are alive and eligible.
- Beneficiaries must tell Sassa when their income, employment, marital status, banking details or home circumstances change.
The South African Social Security Agency (Sassa) says its grant reviews and eLife certification checks are meant to stop fraud and wrongly paid grants, not to cut off people who are entitled to them.
The agency said so in a media statement on Friday, 9 October, after the Auditor-General flagged millions of rand in improper grant payments.
The Auditor-General found that Sassa paid R211.6-million in grants in 2025/26 to beneficiaries who had already died, and flagged other payments to people whose eligibility could not be confirmed.
Sassa said the issues were raised before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Social Development on Wednesday, 7 October.
The agency said it welcomes scrutiny of how public money is managed. Sassa said social assistance is a constitutional obligation and a safety net for millions of vulnerable South Africans, and that the system must also be protected against fraud, abuse, error, misrepresentation and payments to people who no longer qualify.
“SASSA is aware that its intensified social grant reviews and eLife certification measures have attracted criticism from some sections of society and interest groups. Concerns have been raised that these interventions are intended to exclude legitimate beneficiaries from the social assistance system which is outrightly incorrect,” the statement read.
The agency said a social grant is not an unconditional entitlement that continues whatever happens to a beneficiary’s circumstances.
Beneficiaries must tell Sassa when something that could affect their eligibility changes. That includes income, employment, marital status, banking details and where they live.
Reviews check whether beneficiaries still qualify. Sassa said the system cannot be protected by avoiding reviews because they may be uncomfortable or inconvenient.
The eLife certification checks whether beneficiaries are still alive and are the real recipients of the grant.
The agency said it must make sure money is not paid when a beneficiary has died, when it is uncertain whether the beneficiary still exists, or when someone else may be unlawfully accessing the grant. Sassa said reviews and certification are “not designed to arbitrarily terminate grants”.
The agency said people who are legitimately entitled to a grant “should not fear a process designed to verify that they remain eligible”.
Sassa is also enrolling beneficiaries’ biometric details to confirm their identity and make grant payments more secure.
The agency said this reduces the chances of impersonation and fraud, and that it cannot rely on old information forever, because systems, identities, personal circumstances and payment arrangements change.
