Contrary to popular belief, the online system used by Department of Home Affairs (DHA) offices across South Africa can at least function partially — even during periods of downtime. That suggests that the notorious “system is offline” issue many people are greeted with when visiting a DHA branch might be blown out of proportion and used as an excuse when it is not relevant. DHA system downtime has often been blamed for significantly disrupting the department’s ID, passport, and other key citizen and resident services. In response to a question in Parliament earlier this year, former DHA minister Aaron Motsaledi revealed that the department had lost nearly 141,000 working hours between the 2019/2020 and 2022/2023 financial years, primarily due to load-shedding and system downtime.
This is how many South Africans tried to withdraw from the two-pot system in the first day According to the South African Revenue Service (Sars) Commissioner, Edward Kieswetter, close to 2,500 tax withdrawal directives were processed on the first day (September 1, 2024), when the system came into effect. Kieswetter told Daily Maverick that Sars is focused on trying to make sure that all the tax directives are processed in the same amount of time as an assessment, that being five seconds, using Artificial Intelligence (AI). He noted that there are certain requirements one needs to have for your directive to be processed expeditiously. “The three things that would prevent that would be if you were not registered for tax, you have outstanding returns or you owe Sars money. So, we tried to address that ahead of the two-pot system coming into effect,” the commissioner said. Kieswetter noted that by Monday night, Sars had received 2,759 tax directives and the revenue service h...