The interventions by the Department of Labour’s Compensation Fund to improve the current distressed organisational performance are beginning to unfold. This emerged during the Compensation Fund’s turn-around strategy presentation at a meeting of the Select Committee on Labour and Public Enterprises in Cape Town on Wednesday.
Compensation Fund Commissioner, Shadrack Mkhonto, said a Rand Mutual Assurance pilot project is in place to deal with the ills in the Fund to improve its organisational performance.
“Amongst other aspects that we have to improve our performance on, is to reduce the paper through electronic submissions, improve the turnaround time of processing payments and debt collections through flexible channels, implement the new organisational structure as well as decentralisation of CF’s functions in various province,” Mkhonto said.
Mr Groenewald, member of the Select Committee, said we can make as much turn around strategies as possible but if there is no effective management and low staff morale, then we have nothing to work on.
On challenges facing the Fund, Director-General for Labour, Nkosinathi Nhleko said, “issues such as huge numbers of ministerial complaints, audit qualifications, fraud, systems challenges as well as a large number of public protector complaints have infested the fund over the years.”
“It is important to note that we do not have a strategy in place at the moment, but steps are being taken towards the development of a turnaround strategy to address the challenges in the Fund”.
Nhleko said: “amongst other steps we are currently engaging in to remedy the situation are regular stakeholder engagement with medical services providers and business associations as well as engagement with oversight structures such public protector and auditor-general.”
Turning to the return of earnings, Mkhonto said: “for the period ending March 2013, a total of 94,302 online submissions were received with total revenue of R3.3 billion”.
He said in the last two months when 2012 submissions were opened for the submission we received 82 870 submissions with total revenue of R3, 4 billion.
Contact:
Page Boikanyo
Departmental Spokesperson
Cell: 082 809 3195
