[3] SASSA was founded in 2005 to centralise the provision of social security assistance, formerly a primarily provincial function, in order to reduce corruption and improve service delivery.
The social assistance disbursed by SASSA takes the form of various grants; most of them are means-tested and paid in cash on a monthly basis.
[6] A special case is the three-month Social Relief of Distress Grant, which provides immediate temporary assistance in the form of vouchers, food parcels, or cash.
[6] The temporary Covid-19 Social Relief of Distress grant was introduced in May 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic;[7] in October 2022, Enoch Godongwana, the Minister of Finance, announced that it would be extended to remain in place until March 2024.
In January 2012, Cash Paymaster Services (CPS), a subsidiary of Net1 UEPS Technologies, was awarded a five-year, R10 billion tender to distribute social grants on behalf of SASSA from February 2012.
[14] In the 2015/2016 financial year, SASSA recorded additional, irregular expenditure on the CPS contract for the re-registration of grant beneficiaries because legal requirements had been circumvented.
[15] The then Finance Minister, Pravin Gordhan advised the Minister of Social Development Bathabile Dlamini to award a new contract to commercial South African banks and the South African Post Office (SAPO),[14] and forego biometric identification, which contract requirement disadvantaged others bidders against CPS.
[17] In December 2016, SASSA was also advised to inform the Constitutional Court of its predicament, "that it faced the highly irregular prospect of going into contract for another year with [CPS]".
[18] The Black Sash Trust, through representation by the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, launched an application to the Constitutional Court, asking it to compel Dlamini and SASSA to take necessary measures to ensure the social grants system and its beneficiaries were protected when the CPS contract ended on 31 March.
[23] In 2004, the DSD amended the Social Assistance Act in order to disallow anyone other than the beneficiary to deduct money from their account.
[24] In June 2016, SASSA, the Black Sash, and the Association of Community Advice Office (ACAOSA) laid criminal charges against the directors of CPS and Grindrod Bank, claiming that the two companies were not implementing amended regulations under the Social Assistance Act, which amendments compelled companies not to deduct money from social grant beneficiary accounts for financial services.
[26] In a founding affidavit lodged with the North Gauteng High Court, Black Sash asked the court to ring-fence social grant accounts in order to protect grant beneficiaries from exploitation or abuse, and to prevent companies from soliciting beneficiaries around SASSA paypoints[27]—practices which Black Sash and the DSD accused Net1 and its subsidiaries of encouraging.
[28] In October 2024, 2 Stellenbosch University students came forward claiming that there was mass fraud among the youths ID numbers which were being used to collect SASSA SRD R370 grants.