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Authorities have moved to quell fears that a system issuing payouts as part of the temporary employer-employee relief scheme (Ters) was nearing closure.
This comes amid several complaints that City Press received relating to delayed payouts that were shared with the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF), which manages Ters.
Ters forms part of the government’s Covid-19 relief efforts.
Activist, Hettie Fourie, who has been at the forefront of assisting beneficiaries, told City Press this week that UIF commissioner Teboho Maruping had been saying that Ters must come to an end soon.
READ: Employees and employers frustrated as Ters system ‘more down than operational
“But, with no processing being done, how can they even consider closing Ters. So many people are left destitute,” Fourie said.
UIF spokesperson Makhosonke Buthelezi said on Thursday afternoon that the decision has not been taken as yet, “but we want to make sure that employers would have attended to all errors on unprocessed claims by the time we announce the closure”.
Buthelezi said the UIF had experienced a number of fraudulent claims of late payments, and some relate to those that had to be stopped because of the Auditor-General SA findings on Ters.
He said: “So, this situation requires us to tighten gaps in our systems and, as we have done before, we would briefly halt the processing of claims [until] our ICT [information and communications technology] is sure that all issues are addressed,”
Beneficiaries preparing for ‘poverty’
City Press was inundated by complaints this week following a media briefing that was held by Maruping in Cape Town on June 29.
At that briefing, Maruping unpacked the priorities of the UIF in the 2021/22 financial year; and provided an update about Ters and normal benefits, and a progress report on fraud cases and the “follow the money” project.
Fourie said fraud and recovery of misused funds seemed to be the focus of the UIF as Ters had been at a complete standstill for weeks.
Fourie added that officials had gone quiet and thousands of people were stressed and suffering. “At least if we get answers people can prepare themselves for another month of poverty. But to sit and check one’s status every day, praying for a miracle, is just nonsensical.”
Buthelezi said more than 4 million people had been paid and there were fewer than 80 000 claims that were not finalised due to errors.
Batch of complaints
A potential beneficiary, whose name is known to City Press, said she has not been paid despite seven of her colleagues having received their payments. Her employer had applied for Ters between March and October 2020.
“All details captured for the employees were correct and identical in terms of the UIF requirements.”
She said that, for some reason, despite employees’ information being loaded correctly, the UIF had elected not to pay out her claims for July to October.
“I alone get targeted by whatever is going on at UIF. Countless telephone calls have been made to them. Errors that the UIF said supposedly existed on my profile could not be confirmed and now appear to not to have existed. At each instance, the UIF could not revert to my employer with specifics.”
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She said her employer had finally been advised in June that the UIF had rectified, found no errors that needed to be corrected and that the claim would be processed within two weeks.
“We now hear that there has been no processing done for some time. The status on the portal now reflects as ‘Application not yet processed’. My gripe comes with the fact that the responses from the UIF at each instance are noncommittal, useless and not informative at all. I am sure the UIF employees and management, as with all government employees, have not had to suffer salary cuts as the rest of South Africa has had to suffer.”
“So I have been waiting since 2020 for payment. How can an employee like me, who has worked for more than 35 years, have to suffer to put food on the table because of the incompetence of the UIF system? Something has to be done about this. Call in experts if necessary, if the current staff at UIF is incompetent. How much longer must we wait for them to get their act together?”
Buthelezi said they were responding to emails.
