The incumbent administrator of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) Randall Carolissen has painted a bleak picture of the institution when he took over.
Carolissen says he found NSFAS in a state of collapse, coupled with the increase of “third party agents” with commercial interests responsible for the distribution of NSFAS funding on behalf of the entity.
NSFAS was put under administration last year after the dissolution of its board, due to poor governance among many other problems.
He says the previous management and its board implemented an ineffective and poorly designed IT system.
“There was complete uncertainty, and bursary guidelines with large scale discretion inherited in the system. There was no delegation of authority, no segregation of duties… and very poor if at all of financial controls. I keep on referring that-there is this one example where staff took their computers at home and disbursed monies from their kitchen tables, billions and millions of rand of monies. There was also no attention to TVET colleges. The system was completely unstable and collapsing every day,” says Carolissen.
