The Johannesburg Family Court maintenance payment system is back up and running, and no backlog currently exists, says court manager Janine Arends.
This comes after the system was down for three weeks, causing mothers to be without their child support payments for a week. However, after court management realised the problem would not be resolved quickly, a contingency plan was put in place to ensure cash-strapped mothers were not left without any financial support.
Arends explains the payment system allows the court to do electronic payments at specified times during the month. Three weeks ago, the system went down due to a technical error, causing payments to be delayed.
"We quickly determined that it was one of the Telkom telephone lines causing the problem, but there are so many lines [at the court], we could not immediately determine which one. So we had to do assessments on all the lines, and eventually discovered it was a technical problem with the switchboard installation. That is why it took three weeks to resolve the problem."
She says payments were done from another court that uses the same payment management system as the Family Court. All payments are now up to date and the court is processing EFT payments of 16 November.
"There were a lot of complaints," says Arends. "People are expecting payment on a certain date and were very unhappy when it wasn't there. Unfortunately, it was unforeseen circumstances and we only realised after one week it is not going to be an easy solution, so we put the contingency plan in place. This has never happened before."
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