To repair National Population Register and uphold national security, Home Affairs corrects unsustainable under-pricing of verification service
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For more than a decade, banks and financial service providers have only paid R0.15 for real-time verifications against the National Population Register (NPR).
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This is below market-related rates charged by the private sector for comparable services and far below the cost to the State of providing the online verification service (OVS), which deprived Home Affairs of the resources required to maintain the NPR.
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Extreme under-pricing has led to profiteering and abuses by some users that overwhelm the NPR and cause failure rates in excess of 50%, contributing to “system offline” failures at Home Affairs offices and threatening national security.
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After initiating substantial upgrades to the service, Home Affairs today gazetted a new price structure that sets a cost-reflective price for real-time verifications during peak hours at R10, while introducing an off-peak, low-cost alternative for batch transactions costing just R1.
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The Minister of Home Affairs calls upon users to rise above narrow profiteering and put South Africa’s national security interests first.
The Minister of Home Affairs, Dr Leon Schreiber, can today announce that, following an initial pilot that yielded promising results and further enhancements, Home Affairs will on 1 July 2025 begin the rollout of an upgraded National Population Register (NPR) verification service to all companies and government users to verify identities with first-class speed and reliability. This vastly enhanced service, which will boost service delivery from government departments and enhance financial inclusion in the private sector, will be accompanied by appropriate tariff increases implemented after widespread public consultation and after concurrence was obtained from the Minister of Finance.
The Department of Home Affairs has, since 2013, provided the service, known as the online verification system (OVS), to third-parties that connects them to the NPR. This allows these registered users to check identities and other biographical information of their clients against the Home Affairs database.
However, since its rollout more than a decade ago at inappropriately low cost to users, the demands on the OVS have far outstripped the capacity at which it was originally designed. Since then, there has been no substantive upgrade to the system, while demand and the costs of maintaining the infrastructure increased year-on-year. Due to the upgrade stasis and the increased demands placed on the OVS by institutions – and exorbitant over-use by some institutions owing to unsustainably low prices – users now experience a staggering failure rate in excess of 50% on verification checks against the NPR. Even in the case of successful verifications, response times often take hours, thereby defeating the purpose of real-time verification. Both of these factors are directly undermining services that require such verifications, including through the OVS and at Home Affairs offices.
In fact, the under-investment and overloading of the OVS is one key factor behind the challenge of “system offline” at frontline offices. Additionally, an unreliable NPR poses a direct threat to national security as it undermines the ability of the State to verify identities.
The under-pricing of this service – with fees as staggeringly low as R0.15 per verification – has deprived the State of the resources required to maintain and enhance the NPR. In turn, certain private sector users of the OVS have relied on this artificially low price to inflate their corporate profits at the expense of the quality of services received by the public, while also overwhelming the NPR with queries to such an extent that the failure rate now routinely exceeds 50%. Some users then went on to exploit the unreliability of the system created by their excessive use, to create third-party verification services that charge prices vastly in excess of those paid to Home Affairs.
This vicious cycle is unsustainable. The artificially-low pricing structure has led to such severe under-investment in the NPR that it now poses a direct threat to financial inclusion, to the ability of the government to combat identity and financial crime, and to national security. Home Affairs is bringing an end to this vicious cycle.
Effective from 1 July 2025, and following significant development work by the Department and its service providers, a new OVS will be rolled-out to all users. The upgraded OVS functions as a sleek, modern system that delivers what it was designed to do. It now performs in real-time and the failure rate has been reduced to below 1%. For the first time, the new system will also introduce an option for users to do “non-live batch verifications” during off-peak hours at a significantly lower fee than real-time verifications. This will offer both a cost-effective alternative to real-time verifications and incentivise users to stop overloading the OVS’ live queue, reducing the problem of “system offline” at frontline Home Affairs offices.
As a result, and for the first time in more than a decade, Home Affairs has increased the fees for a single real-time verification check to R10 per transaction. For non-live batch verifications where a user wishes to verify multiple records simultaneously during off-peak periods, the cost will be R1 per verification field request. This cost is appropriate for the service provided, and is not unreasonable when viewed against the costs charged to clients of the organisations utilising the OVS. There will continue to be no charge for the use of this service by other government departments.
Minister Leon Schreiber said: “This is a matter of national security, plain and simple. Every responsible State on earth must take the necessary steps to ensure a functional population register. This upgrade also advances financial inclusion and makes a significant contribution to South Africa’s attempts to get off the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list. I thank the many stakeholders who expressed support for this vital reform in the interest both of national security and of South Africa Inc during our public consultations, and call upon all users of the OVS to rise above narrow profiteering to support the safeguarding of national security.”
Minister Schreiber concluded: “A healthy NPR is also a prerequisite for a functional Digital ID, as the NPR must become the central database against which identities are verified as Home Affairs becomes a digital-first department. This investment in the NPR is an investment in national security, in financial inclusion, and in the value of our cherished South African identity that will pay off handsomely for our country.”
Organisations who would like to be connected to the new OVS must send an email to: Verifications@dha.gov.za.
A copy of the gazette containing the new fee schedule can be accessed here: https://www.dha.gov.za/images/gazettes/gazette-52893-230625-dha.pdf
Enquiries:
Siya Qoza
Cell: 082 898 1657
Duwayne Esau
Spokesperson for the Minister
Cell: 077 606 9702
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