This news aggregator site highlights South African labour news from a wide range of internet and print sources. Each posting has a synopsis of the source article, together with a link or reference to the original. Postings cover the range of labour related matters from industrial relations to generalist human resources.
SowetanLive reports that a Northern Cape Department of Home Affairs (DHA) official got into her employer's system, stole people's ID numbers, opened funeral policies, nominated herself as the beneficiary and then declared the owners of those IDs dead.
She then collected insurance monies while her victims were left to struggle, unable to access their social grants, banks and other services as they had been declared dead and their IDs blocked. According to Lt-Col Tebogo Thebe, spokesperson for the Hawks in the Northern Cape, Dawn Celeste Pieterson, 45, was found guilty on Wednesday of fraud at the Calvinia Magistrate's Court.
Thebe said Pieterson's crimes took place between February 2019 and September 2022 when she was still an employee of the DHA in Calvinia where she had access to the national population register. “Pieterson took funeral covers from reputable insurance companies and nominated herself as a beneficiary. To benefit, she manipulated the national population register by falsely issuing BI-1663 forms (notice of death forms) to reflect the fictitious death of the victims. The system registered the affected persons as deceased, resulting in a plethora of problems in the victims’ day to day lives,” he indicated. The matter was postponed to 26 January 2026 for sentencing.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Botho Molosankwe at SowetanLive
- Read too, Home affairs official found guilty of faking deaths to claim funeral policy payouts, at News24 (subscription / trial registration required)
Get other news reports at the SA LabourNews home page