State printer has been in disarray since 2021, and a court showdown with insolvency practitioners appears imminent. From Moneyweb.
The government gazettes that come out every Friday are eagerly perused by professionals across the country in search of new tenders, insolvency notices, legal amendments and regulatory changes, to name a few.
These gazettes are produced by the Government Printing Works (GPW), which falls under the Department of Home Affairs.
It’s been in disarray since 2021, prompting the South African Restructuring and Insolvency Practitioners Association (Saripa) to launch an urgent court application to compel the GPW to do its job and ensure “the timeous, complete and accurate publication of legal gazettes which insolvency practitioners require in order to practise their trade, occupation or profession and to comply with their statutory obligations”.
Also cited as respondents in the case are the minister and director-general of Home Affairs.
There are about 750 members of Saripa, comprising insolvency and business restructuring practitioners, lawyers, accountants and other professionals.
They complain that the GPW has fallen into such a state of dysfunction that insolvency and other legal notices routinely miss publication deadlines. This lapse means that estates cannot be wound up timeously, paralysing the distribution of funds owed to creditors, employees, heirs, beneficiaries and the South African Revenue Service.
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The GPW opposed the application and admitted there was an “ongoing service failure”, which it blames on Covid, load shedding and outdated systems.
Court cases
Saripa won a court order against the GPW and the Department of Home Affairs on 1 July 2021, in which the GPW was ordered to publish legal gazettes every Friday without interruption or delay and to ensure that all requests for quotations and publications of notices are attended to promptly.
After that order was granted, a manual system was implemented at the GPW pending the full restoration of the electronic system. This appeared to work for a while until the manual system also began to fail.
On 31 May 2022, Saripa launched an urgent contempt of court application against the minister and director-general of Home Affairs and the CEO of GPW. However, this application was struck from the roll due to a lack of urgency.
The contempt of court application matter is still pending and has been placed in abeyance after the GPW gave an undertaking that it would adhere to the court order granted on 1 July 2021 and fully restore the system.
In a recent letter to the state attorney on behalf of Saripa, Jana Reyneke of Jaco Roos Inc states: “Three years have passed since the granting of the order, your clients (GPW) are allegedly in the process of ‘restoring’ the system and the activities, yet the gazettes are still not being published every Friday without interruption or delay nor are the requests for publications attended to promptly.”
Among the complaints from insolvency practitioners:
- The online system for quotations for publication is not working;
- Emails are not always delivered because mailboxes are full;
- Emails are not attended to promptly, and often receive no response;
- The quote system is often offline, and quotation numbers are not being provided to allow for online payments for advertisements;
- Members of the public requesting publication in the gazettes have to first obtain quotations and then resend advertisements, quotations and proof of payment as required by the manual system implemented by GPW; and
- In many instances, advertisements are required to be published in the Government Gazette and one or two other newspapers. When notices do not appear in the Government Gazette, the advertisements must be republished in the newspapers at a cost of between R200 and R5 000 a time.
Saripa says the GPW is not fulfilling its constitutional mandate, nor is it complying with the 2021 court order to provide timeous printing services.
Unpublished gazettes ‘not a usual reoccurrence’
In response, the state attorney says that “in every system there will be disruptions” and that these are attended to by GPW whenever they occur to ensure business continuity, adding that unpublished gazettes are not a usual reoccurrence requiring the intervention of the courts.
The state attorney goes on to say the challenges in re-automating the publication of the gazette were dilapidated network and server hardware and a “lack of system development life cycle framework”.
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The electronic gazette was in the process of being migrated to the cloud to improve system reliability and availability, with various other tech upgrades and rebuilds to improve business continuity and disaster management.
GPW has promised to publish all missed or unpublished notices for free on a date to be communicated beforehand.
That’s not good enough, says Saripa. The GPW has had three years to get its act together and has made repeated promises of a fix, each of which has proven fruitless.
It looks like the matter will most likely have to return to court for a resolution, and Saripa will have no alternative but to proceed with the contempt of court application against those responsible.