After they were found to be involved in the so-called illegal dumping of fees, 11 City of Johannesburg licensing testing centre employees have been dismissed.
They were found guilty of fraud, corruption, dishonesty and breached sections 13 and 25 of the National Road Traffic Act, 1996 [93 of 1996] as well as the City’s standard licensing procedures after an internal disciplinary hearing.
MMC for Public Safety, Michael Sun, said the former employees were using ways to register vehicles to fictitious individuals and ‘dumping’ the traffic fees and penalties of offenders by transferring the amounts payable to these non- existent people.
“Thereafter the corrupt employees would then re-register the vehicles of the offenders back in their name so that they are not liable for the traffic fees or penalties on the system and would proceed to issue vehicle licence discs and others documents,” he said.
Alleged fraud at licensing departments within Joburg has been under the spotlight for over a year.
Early last year investigations revealed that about R15 million had been lost and 1 000 fraudulent transactions have taken place since January 2008.
Sun said that one of the first campaigns embarked upon when he took office as MMC was the Anti–Fraud and Corruption campaign, because he could not stand with arms folded and ‘watch the corrupt business go by under our noses’.
“No employee within our department will get away with fraud and corruption.”
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