There’s still time to apply for the UIF Ters benefit

If you were unable to apply for the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) Covid-19 temporary employer/employee relief scheme (Ters) benefit in the last three months, there is still a chance.

The UIF commissioner says the fund will continue to accept and process Covid-19 Ters claims for April, May and June as per the directive issued by Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi on March 26. The scheme will however only process and pay for claims for the past three months.

“Although June was the last month for the Covid-19 Ters benefits as per the directive, the UIF will continue to process and pay claims submitted for this period until the cut-off date is determined,” said the UIF Commissioner Teboho Maruping.

“However, we will not accept claims submitted for July onwards as that falls outside of the time period stipulated in the directive for the Covid-19 Ters benefits.”

System glitches

While the fund is still experiencing technical challenges experienced with the opening of the system for June submissions, it will accept  claims for the full three-month period.

The main problem now relates to the swapping of employer profiles when users try to submit claims, which causes a potential security breach.

Maruping explains that the system initially opened for June applications on June 23. It aimed to start making the first payments on June 25 to ensure that employees didn’t have to  wait too long for their payments. “Unfortunately, we experienced problems with the swapping of user profiles and we immediately shut it down for June and rolled back to [processing applications for] May to fix the problem.”

Processing capacity increased

Maruping says they deployed the system again on June 24, but the problem persisted. Ultimately,  the IT engineers increased the capacity of the system to enable it to simultaneously process claims for April, May and June.

Read: ‘Significant’ improvement to UIF relief scheme

“The good thing is that the data is safe and we will ultimately be able to finalise the claims and pay monies due to employees once we have resolved the current issues.”

Maruping said the fund has roped in external resources to help deal with the problem quickly.

However, it will make sure the system is completely stable before reopening for June applications.

“I wish to apologise to employers and employees for further delays,” he said. “We are however working around the clock to fix the problem. We anticipate complete testing by Friday [June 3] so that we can open the system again over the weekend if everything goes according to plan.”