While the price of everything else increases, government has seemingly recently remembered to raise the price of one of its services from cents to rands.
Home Affairs said this week it is "correcting the unsustainable under-pricing of its verification service".
For more than a decade, banks and financial service providers have paid 15c for real-time verifications against the National Population Register (NPR). This allows the registered users to check identities and other biographical information of their clients against the home affairs database.
Department spokesperson Siya Qoza said this is below market-related rates charged by the private sector for comparable services and far below the cost to the state of providing the online verification service, which deprived home affairs of the resources required to maintain the NPR.
"Extreme under-pricing has led to profiteering and abuses by some users that overwhelm the NPR and cause failure rates in excess of 50%, contributing to 'system offline' failures at home affairs offices."
After initiating substantial upgrades to the service, home affairs on Monday gazetted a new price structure.
This sets the price for real-time verifications during peak hours at R10 per request.
An option for users to do "non-live batch verifications" during off-peak hours is being introduced at a cost of R1.
The updated system's failure rate has been reduced to below 1%, according to the department. It will be in effect from July 1.
TimesLIVE
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