Payment re-runs under way for outstanding Covid-19 TERS benefit payments

Workers who did not receive their Covid-19 TERS benefit payment from the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) have been assured that payment re-runs for outstanding claims were under way for the period of April to September 15.

The fund has also started processing and paying claims to foreign nationals who were verified via the department of home affairs and the SA Revenue Service (Sars), the UIF said in a statement on Wednesday.

The payments come on the back of R55.6bn already paid to millions of workers since the lockdown started in March. The figures include just over R2bn paid to 491,410 foreign nationals from 95,834 applications by employers.

“The fund has been sporadically re-running claims for the previous months, but this time we have decided to recycle all claims to ensure that those that have updated declarations and discrepancies are paid when we re-run the payments. We have dedicated the entire week to re-run payments for a period between April to September 2020, and we shall repeat for all lockdown period on Saturday, December 19 to try clear the backlog as far as we possibly can so that beneficiaries will not suffer during this festive season,” said acting UIF commissioner Marsha Bronkhorst.

Payments for the September 16 to October 15 period have already commenced with R1bn disbursed to 272,686 workers through 22,884 employer claims. The fund said applications for this period closed on December 31 and no further applications would be accepted.

Bronkhorst, said annual leave for key personnel had been postponed to fast-track the processing and payment of claims, including claims for normal UIF benefits. “Officials at senior management and those processing and paying claims will not be going on leave except for the mandatory shutdown period from December 24 2020 to January 1 2021, which is used for systems maintenance. The decision to postpone annual leave for some of our officials was not taken lightly, but is being implemented to ensure that we continue to process and pay claims to our beneficiaries to enable them to meet their financial obligations and support their families during the festive season,” said Bronkhorst.

The fund advised employers who submitted Covid-19 TERS claims via CSV file for April to September 15, where “no employees” appears on the online portal, to assume that their CSV file was incorrectly formatted. These could be resubmitted.

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