Mildred Oliphant

The Compensation Fund (CF) overpaid R21 million to service providers since October last year, after migrating to a SAP system.

Responding to a question in the National Assembly, labour minister Mildred Oliphant said the CF implemented a new claims management system in October 2011.

“Since the inception of the new system, there has been an incident of overpayment to service providers, whereby a double payment was effected when a payment file was submitted twice to the bank.”

The fund has subsequently contacted all affected service providers to recover the overpayment and the recovery process is under way, says Oliphant.

She adds that a total of R21 million was overpaid, and to date an amount of R3 million has been recovered, leaving an amount of R18 million outstanding.

“The fund has since automated this process, which will ensure that a repeat will not occur.”

The City of Joburg also experienced and continues to experience billing issues, after migrating to a SAP platform.

Residents are being grossly over-billed and unjustly cut off from services, due to challenges with the city’s SAP implementation – a project codenamed Phakama. Phakama’s aim was to move the city’s disparate and legacy systems onto one platform.

However, SAP previously said the billing crisis plaguing the city has nothing to do with its software and it was not involved in the post-implementation phase of the Phakama project.

The company did not respond to requests for comment on the latest billing issue by the time of publication.

Oliphant was also questioned about the SAP system not accepting running accounts and the impact this billing change would have on the CF’s finances.

“Service providers submit invoices electronically to medical aids on a daily basis as per individual treatment and date, and not as running accounts,” responded Oliphant.