Friday, October 3, 2025
Home Affairs Minister, Dr Leon Schreiber, has welcomed the conviction of a dismissed official, Dawn Pieterson, who has been found guilty on nine counts of fraud and two counts of contravening the Births and Deaths Registration Act.
Pieterson was formerly employed at the Department of Home Affairs office in Calvinia in the Northern Cape, where she abused her access to departmental records to commit fraud and corruption between February 2019 and September 2022.
She did this by opening funeral policies on clients’ identity numbers, nominating herself as the beneficiary, then falsely declaring the holders of the ID numbers as deceased in order to access the payouts.
The department said it would continue to monitor the case as Pieterson is scheduled to be sentenced on 26 January 2026.
“This latest successful conviction is another step forward in our ongoing work to clean up Home Affairs. It is the ninth conviction secured through the collaboration between the department and law enforcement agencies. It also follows the dismissal of 37 officials since July 2024.
“I applaud the department’s Counter Corruption unit for this conviction, as well as our partners in the Hawks and other entities.”
The Minister said the modus operandi used in this case confirmed the fundamental importance of the digital transformation agenda.
“By fully automating and digitalising all departmental processes, as we are doing through the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) for visas and through Digital ID for civics services, we will eliminate the space for human discretion and interference exploited by criminals like Pieterson.
“We are absolutely determined to both put criminal officials behind bars, while simultaneously using technology to close the loopholes they exploit. This is how we can defeat the scourge of corruption once and for all,” the Minister said. – SAnews.gov.za
