Financial Mail reports that after a rocky start, the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) is working hard to dramatically increase its capacity to pay out conventional unemployment benefits as well as temporary employer/employee relief scheme (Ters) claims.  

Ters allows companies and employees who contribute to UIF to apply for financial relief if they have been affected by the Covid-19 lockdown through company closures or salary cuts.  The three-month scheme is set to run until the end of June.  In a dramatic turnaround from early April, when the fund was swamped by benefit claims, labour minister Thulas Nxesi said last week the UIF had paid out Ters benefits of R15bn to nearly 3-million workers for April.  However, it hasn’t been enough to clear the backlog.  UIF commissioner Teboho Maruping indicated last week that they were still working flat out to finalise outstanding payments for April.  And there have been further hiccups.  The UIF only started accepting applications for benefits for May on the last working day of that month.  According to Cosatu’s Matthew Parks, “the main [glitch] is that employers were submitting applications incorrectly, in part due to the complicated process”.  Meantime, the UIF has increased the number of operators at its call centre from 27 to 600.  It has also streamlined its application and processing procedures.  The UIF has also gone so far as to temporarily overlook noncompliance, as long as employers undertake to register their employees and pay outstanding UIF contributions.

• Read the full original of the informative report in the above regard by Warren Thompson at BusinessLive
• Read too, UIF is ‘keeping to promise on payments’, on page 4 of The Star of 3 June 2020

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