Ward 102 councillor David Potter has raised concerns over piles of public paperwork allegedly left in an easy to access part of the Randburg Civic Centre.
Potter was shocked to discover the documents at the City of Joburg Walk-in Centre, which offers a multitude of important City services for customers, and the renewal of drivers and vehicle licences.
“The bowels of the Randburg Civic Centre are unused and are thus convenient for the City of Joburg to store these piles of documents,” said Potter.
“However, access to the building is pretty easy. There are many entry points and once in the building, you can spend hours or days unnoticed on this level. Doors to these offices where the piles of paper are are all unlocked,” claimed Potter.
In these piles of paper are the original application forms and supporting documents used to renew a driver’s licence, register motor vehicles, change ownership of vehicles, and more.
Besides copies of ID books, smart card IDs, passports and permits, such packs contain sensitive personal detail such as a physical address, cell numbers and vehicle particulars.
“I believe that this might be the case at other licensing centres in the city. I have written to the Executive Mayor, the City Manager, the Director of Public Safety, the Director of Licensing, and the MMC for Public Safety and have yet to get any formal response. The only response I got was from the MMC for Public Safety on Monday saying she will deal with it.”
He said what was of concern was that these extremely sensitive documents were stored in a manner which posed a risk to the many thousands of transactions that go through the Randburg Licensing Department monthly.
“It is unknown which years these documents relate to, and for how long such paperwork is to be kept, but it would only make sense that it needs to be kept in the event of a case of duplicate licence fraud, or transactional fraud by applicants or City officials and the like.”
He added that it was concerning that the City of Joburg did not make use of formal and professional archive services that existed to manage this kind of paperwork and mitigate risk to the applicants and the City.
“Somewhere in those piles is a copy of my smart card ID which was used to renew my driver’s licence recently, which is very concerning,” concluded Potter.
The Randburg Sun has contacted the office of the Executive Mayor and the MMC for Public Safety and is awaiting their response.
