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Home Affairs in fraud warBy HTS

Midrand, April 23 -- THE Department of Home Affairs has embarked on a "war on queues" at DHA offices across the country to ensure swift service delivery of services.

The Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba, launched the campaign in Pretoria yesterday in the wake of an expose in The New Age on Friday about the long turnaround times, queues, corruption and even abuse of customers at a number of DHA offices.

Gigaba said interventions had been put in place to ensure South Africans and non-South Africans were served professionally with a reduced waiting period. "The critical challenge for us now is to reduce the amount of time clients spend in our offices," Gigaba, who described the campaign as being of "paramount importance", said.

The minister pinpointed factors that contributed to the delays in processing documentation including IDs, passports and permits for foreign nationals.

These he said included poor management in some offices, ineffective utilisation of staff, lack of an appointment system, inefficient management of queues, concurrent running of manual and automated systems, uneven distribution of offices based on demographics and misinformation on the discontinuation of green barcoded IDs.

Speaking on the interventions to manage queues and to improve the department's work, Gigaba said the department would deploy 78 live capture mobile units across the country this financial year. These mobile units will prioritise pupils and citizens in rural and secluded areas. Gigaba touched on future plans of setting up offices which have stations that can assist clients with the whole process in one go.

He said the department would "pilot a one-stop workstation that takes fingerprints and photographs, to streamline processes and reduce the time clients spend in Home Affairs offices". The minister said some of these short-term actions are scheduled to commence for roll-out from as early as today.

Other additional short term actions include commissioning a customer satisfaction survey, getting the client contact centre working optimally, find a solution for unpredictable walk-in clients and for front office space, explore possibilities of a new shift system, attend to the unstable system, scale-up unannounced visits by senior managers to offices, improve workflow and beef-up communication with clients.

The department, which has 411 offices nationally, with 184 offices which are processing applications and collections of smart ID cards and passports while offering other services, serves a population of 56 million and millions of immigrants and tourists.

Gigaba applauded his officials on the tremendous successes in reducing the turnaround times for processing of documents and handling a larger volume of clients than their operational capability.

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