Company Profile for 'National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS)'

Company Profile

NSFAS works in close partnership with South Africa’s higher education institutions and further education and training colleges. It is the Financial Aid offices at these institutions that do most of the initial processing of the awards.

They are responsible for advertising the availability of the awards; inviting application for the awards; testing the eligibility of the applicants in terms of their financial need and academic potential to succeed; determining the size of the award; making the award and then dispatching the approved loan agreement forms to the NSFAS Head Office in Cape Town.

Once a loan has been approved by NSFAS, the institution is paid by NSFAS and the Financial Aid office at the institution ensures that the students’ fee accounts are credited on receipt of the money. Finally, at the end of the year the Financial Aid offices send year-end reports to NSFAS which allow NSFAS to calculate the extent of the bursary received by each awardee based on academic success.

It is not merely assumed that all of the above are happening ethically and as per instructions. The work of each Financial Aid office gets monitored by NSFAS’s Institution Liaison team and is then audited by independent auditors on instruction from NSFAS. The NSFAS Internal Auditor examines each and every audit report and the NSFAS Chief Executive Officer makes it his responsibility to ensure that he follows up on anything that might appear to be amiss. Each individual audit report is received by NSFAS’s auditors in order to ensure that the correct operating procedures are adhered to. NSFAS is confident that student financial aid has been administered honourably and professionally in 2005.

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