Home Affairs Minister, Dr Leon Schreiber, on Monday announced that the department will on 1 July 2025 begin the rollout of an upgraded National Population Register (NPR) verification service to all companies and government users to verify identities with speed and reliability.
This enhanced service, which will boost service delivery from government departments and enhance financial inclusion in the private sector, will be accompanied by tariff increases implemented after widespread public consultation and after concurrence was obtained from the Minister of Finance.
The department has since 2013 provided the service – known as the online verification system (OVS) – to third parties that connects them to the NPR.
This allows these registered users to check identities and other biographical information of their clients against the Home Affairs database.
However, since its rollout more than a decade ago at a low cost to users, the demands on the OVS have far outstripped the capacity at which it was originally designed.
Since then, there has been no substantive upgrade to the system, while demand and the costs of maintaining the infrastructure increased year-on-year.
“Due to the upgrade stasis and the increased demands placed on the OVS by institutions – and exorbitant over-use by some institutions owing to unsustainably low prices – users now experience a staggering failure rate in excess of 50% on verification checks against the NPR.
“Even in the case of successful verifications, response times often take hours, thereby defeating the purpose of real-time verification.
“Both of these factors are directly undermining services that require such verifications, including through the OVS and at Home Affairs offices,” said the department.
Under-investment and overloading of the OVS is a key factor behind the challenge of having “offline systems” at frontline offices. Additionally, an unreliable NPR poses a direct threat to national security as it undermines the ability of the State to verify identities.
The under-pricing of this service – with fees as low as R0.15 per verification – has deprived the State of the resources required to maintain and enhance the NPR.
In turn, said the department, certain private sector users of the OVS have relied on this artificially low price to inflate their corporate profits at the expense of the quality of services received by the public, while also overwhelming the NPR with queries to such an extent that the failure rate now routinely exceeds 50%.
Effective from 1 July 2025, and following significant development work by the department and its service providers, a new OVS will be rolled out to all users.
The upgraded OVS functions as a sleek, modern system that delivers what it was designed to do. It now performs in real-time and the failure rate has been reduced to below 1%.
For the first time, the new system will also introduce an option for users to do “non-live batch verifications” during off-peak hours at a significantly lower fee than real-time verifications.
This will offer both a cost-effective alternative to real-time verifications and incentivise users to stop overloading the OVS’ live queue, reducing the “system offline” challenge at frontline Home Affairs offices.
As a result, and for the first time in more than a decade, Home Affairs has increased the fees for a single real-time verification check to R10 per transaction.
For non-live batch verifications where a user wishes to verify multiple records simultaneously during off-peak periods, the cost will be R1 per verification field request.
This cost is appropriate for the service provided and is not unreasonable when viewed against the costs charged to clients of the organisations utilising the OVS, according to the department.
There will be no charge for the use of this service by other government departments.
The Minister said this was a matter of national security as every responsible State must take the necessary steps to ensure a functional population register.
“This upgrade also advances financial inclusion and makes a significant contribution to South Africa’s attempts to get off the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list.
“I thank the many stakeholders who expressed support for this vital reform in the interest both of national security and of South Africa Inc during our public consultations and call upon all users of the OVS to rise above narrow profiteering to support the safeguarding of national security,” the Minister said.
“A healthy NPR is also a prerequisite for a functional Digital ID, as the NPR must become the central database against which identities are verified as Home Affairs becomes a digital-first department.
“This investment in the NPR is an investment in national security, in financial inclusion, and in the value of our cherished South African identity that will pay off handsomely for our country,” Schreiber said.
Organisations who would like to be connected to the new OVS must send an email to [email protected].
A copy of the gazette containing the new fee schedule can be accessed at https://www.dha.gov.za/images/gazettes/gazette-52893-230625-dha.pdf. – SAnews.gov.za
