Home Affairs minister Dr Leon Schreiber.
Home Affairs offices lost 13,867 hours to system failures during the past financial year, according to Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber, who disclosed the figure in a written reply to Parliament.
That is the equivalent of 578 full days without service.
A further 11,479 hours were lost to failures on the national population register, the database that holds every birth, death, marriage and identity number in the country.
But Schreiber also told Parliament that the department could not say how much time the public had actually lost, because it has never been able to measure it.
