WHAT IS PAIA?

​”The due date for PAIA and POPI is 1 July 2021”

​PAIA is the acronym for the Promotion of Access to Information Act and it enables people to gain access to information held by public and private bodies so they may exercise any rights they have in relation to the information. It was historically only applied to government organisations and the legislation was expanded to apply to more businesses.

The PAIA manual does not have to be submitted to any regulator or person at this stage, it is, however, very important that the PAIA manual reflects on your company's website should PAIA apply to your company. There are thresholds' in place to indicate which companies are subject to a PAIA compliance and the rest of the companies that fall beneath these threshold amounts are exempt from having to comply with PAIA.

The PAIA thresholds are as follows, and should your company have this amount of employees of annual turnover per specific sector, you need to have a PAIA Manual in place (this may change from time to time):

The due date for PAIA and POPI is 1 July 2021, and it is immensely important that your company complies within the given due date to prevent any fines or penalties by the regulator.