Minister of Labour and Social Protection of the Population of Kazakhstan Svetlana Zhakupova spoke about violations in the activities of social infrastructure entities.
According to the "Kazinform" news agency, citing the minister, the country is implementing the digitalisation of social institutions, including orphanages, children's homes, juvenile adaptation centres and correctional centres.
To date, the project is being implemented in Shymkent, with the aim of "ensuring the effective distribution of budget funds from local executive bodies".
Zhakupova noted that the introduction of licensing for social services has revealed a number of problems. It emerged that since 2009, some organisations have been providing social services without meeting the established requirements.
"At the same time, today about 500 organisations with a licence must ensure this quality. Regarding social services, I am citing the figures and I state completely officially and responsibly that we have returned about 31 billion tenge to the state budget", the minister said.
She also emphasised that the reports listed 135,000 people who were supposedly receiving social services, but in fact only 82,000 citizens received assistance.
"On paper, there were one set of reports, but according to the digitalisation, 1,039 organisations were submitting reports as if they were providing social services; in fact, only about 800 remained. 500 received licences, and we refused 300 organisations because they did not meet the requirements", she added.
Earlier, the Pavlodar prosecutor's office revealed instances of illegal fees being charged by the management of one of the rehabilitation centres for providing social services to persons with disabilities. It was reported that the institution is funded from the local budget.