THEIR names are on a list. More than 12,000 of them – former civil servants dismissed for fraud, corruption and misconduct, or who resigned in a hurry when disciplinary charges closed in. For years, that list existed only in fragments: buried in departmental files, locked in HR silos, invisible to the next employer. The revolving door spun freely.
It is spinning no more.
South Africa’s Presidency has established the Central Register for Dismissals and Resignations with Disciplinary Cases Pending – a live, searchable database that allows any government department, at any level, to instantly check whether a job applicant carries a record that should bar them from public service. The regulations making that check a legal obligation across all three spheres of government are on the desk of the Minister of Public Service and Administration, ready for signature.
Jonathan Timm, the Presidency official responsible for anti-corruption coordination, described the mechanism at an Institute for Security Studies seminar in Johannesburg — and did not understate its significance.
“What we’ve done is, using an existing capability with the DPSA, built a capability where you can input the ID number of anybody and you will get a response online on whether that ID number matches a record where an official has been dismissed,” Timm told the gathering.
The architecture is deliberate in its simplicity. A recruiting authority types in an ID number. The system responds. The record of any previous dismissal – or resignation while facing a disciplinary case – is immediately visible. The consultation must then be logged as part of the appointment process.
“People cannot claim ignorance,” Timm said flatly.
“People cannot claim ignorance.” — Jonathan Timm, Presidency Anti-Corruption Coordination
The Register currently holds more than 12,000 records – a number that reflects both the scale of misconduct within the public service and the decades during which there was no coherent mechanism to track it. It was built not through an expensive outsourced procurement project but by adapting existing DPSA infrastructure — a deliberate methodological choice that Timm said is proving more effective than the conventional approach.
“We’ve followed an approach that says what is available within the state system and how can we adapt IT, and how can we work iteratively — rather than going to a procurement and an outsourcing approach,” he explained. “A lot of hype, a lot of possibility, a lot of sales talk — but actually those who have to use the system are neglected when it comes to implementation.”
The Register is not a standalone intervention. It sits within a broader ecosystem of anti-corruption mechanisms the Presidency has been constructing, largely without public fanfare, over the past several years.
Central to that ecosystem is the President’s formal response to the Zondo State Capture Commission. The Presidency translated the Commission’s sweeping recommendations into 60 discrete, trackable actions – monitored through an internal tracker under the leadership of Director-General Phindile Baleni. Sixty percent of those actions have been completed or are substantially complete. The remaining work is structural: reforming control environments, hardening data governance, and closing the institutional loopholes that enabled state capture to take root.
Timm was careful to frame this not as a finish line approaching, but as a foundation being laid.
“When you do something upstream now, it might be very tentative, but you are creating an awareness and conditions that you would be able to leverage in a few years from now,” he said.
The most ambitious of those upstream conditions is the government’s digital transformation programme, Mzansi – and Timm described it in terms that leave little doubt about its anti-corruption potential. At its core is a commitment to digital public infrastructure: a single authoritative digital identity system anchored at Home Affairs; a government data exchange platform, Mzansi Exchange, enabling authorised inter-institutional data sharing; and a digital payments infrastructure that will allow the state to track and audit all payments to and from government in near real time.
The implications for corruption are structural. Ghost employees become detectable. Irregular procurement patterns become visible. Payments to suppliers who share addresses, or to individuals flagged on the Central Register, can be automatically flagged. The state moves, for the first time, from chasing corruption after the fact to anticipating and blocking it at the point of transaction.
“The ability to track, to analyse payments emanating or being received by the state is a game changer,” Timm said. “This is all early work – but we have a framework now which we’ve never had before.”
For now, the Central Register remains the most immediately operational expression of that framework – a straightforward, unglamorous tool doing a job that should have been done decades ago. Twelve thousand names. One search. No more revolving door.
