EFF Member of Parliament Sinawo Thambo says it is distressing that it took the introduction of the two-pot system for the Pension Fund Adjudicator to raise the alarm about the pension funds of workers.
Muvhango Lukhaimane indicated that the introduction of the retirement system will expose the extent of employers failure to pay their employees contributions to pension fund schemes.
The system, which kicked off this month, allows workers to withdraw funds from their pension and provident fund savings while still being employed.
Thambo says they raised the issue since January but were not paid attention to.
We have discovered that 172 local government municipalities have also not been compliant for periods ranging from 26 to 240 months, so respectively municipalities owe a billion to pension funds. And private security companies also owe R6 billion. Thats a total of R7 billion of workers money that is unaccounted for. And that is an extremely critical thing that we raised in January. We wrote to the Minister of Finance in February to alert him of this crisis and to urge him to conduct necessary auditing compliance measures over municipalities and private security companies to ensure that they pay back workers money. And its unfortunate now that it took the two-pot system to come into place where theres a semblance of mass retirement that put these pension funds under pressure.
