In an affidavit submitted to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA), Itayi Charakupa, the RAF’s former senior actuarial manager, revealed how the Fund’s 2020-21 financial statements deliberately understated its claims liability by hundreds of billions of rands. – The Citizen (23 October 2025)
Charakupa testified that, as of March 2021, the RAF’s total liability should have been correctly valued at R356.1bn. However, the annual statements reflected a liability of only R29.6bn.
This change, he said, artificially “understated liabilities by R326.5bn” and had “no basis in actuarial reality”.
By dropping the approved IFRS 4 standard, which is designed for insurance-type obligations, and replacing it with IPSAS 42, a framework intended for social benefits, the RAF “quietly pushed all outstanding and unreported claims from accidents that had already occurred off the balance sheet”.