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The Zimbabwe Revenue Authority has sent nine officials from its finance department on forced leave to pave way for investigations into an attempt to siphon nearly US$2 million from the tax man’s fiscal accounts.
An alert official in the IT security department discovered a suspicions transfer from a Zimra account into a bank account before alerting officials.
The bank was alerted of the attempted fraud, leading to interception of the money. The suspect attempted a second transfer but could not complete it after the system barred the illicit transaction.
Last night, Zimra commissioner general Ms Faith Mazani told The Sunday Mail that the tax man is investigating individuals who had access to the system at the time of the transfer.
“Yesterday, our staff was working on the system… and the person who was working on it then realised that a transaction had been initiated and they quickly tried to check who it was.
“They established the identity of the transaction before it went through to a bank and they quickly alerted the bank and intercepted it.
“Another transaction was attempted but the system had already been blocked.
“Because we are in the process of strengthening our system, this enabled us to see that transaction but we don’t know who it was.
“We are working in an environment where we don’t know who is doing what and there were compromises of identities, we then decided to move out the people who are in the environment of the payment system so that we do investigations.
“No one has been incriminated.”
She said investigations are being carried out to establish who was behind the attempted scam before a police report is made.
“The public should know where we were, we are actually tightening our systems. The reason we are taking this position on our staff is so that they (our staff) are not compromised.
“Our IT security guys are working on it (the investigation) and once we have identified those involved, we will be calling back the cleared ones.
Online Reporter