UIF payment system tightened, hence delays

Scammers should be aware that the Unemployment Insurance Fund’s (UIF’s) Covid-19 Temporary Employee Relief Scheme (Ters) has tightened the security of its payment system.

This comes after months of technical glitches, with the final straw of fraudulent activities in the UIF Ters system, just as the scheme was coming to an end.

To protect the scheme from criminal elements, the fund has introduced new, more stringent controls to verify banking details.

Hence the delay in payments this month.

As part of the new control measures, applicants must insert either the enterprise number (CK/CIPC) or the ID number of the bank account holder in the Ters online portal, in order to further verify the authorised claimant’s banking details.

“This requirement, which may seem onerous, is critical to ensure banking details are verified before any Ters payment is authorised. Failure to populate the system properly will, unfortunately, lead to more delays in the payment process,” warns UIF Commissioner Teboho Maruping.

The fund has received fraud complaints, after some applicants managed to change their companies’ recorded banking details to their own.

“This situation has created a need for us to do an upfront account verification and validation before the payment is made, and we expect this to increase our turnaround time by two days, as the accounts are verified and validated to ensure that fraud at the company level is eliminated and reduced as far as possible.

“We cannot overemphasise how important it is for companies to provide correct information that can be validated and verified with the banks so that there are no delays with the payment,” says Maruping.

The new changes come on the back of the fund having paid just over R 1.01 billion directly into the bank accounts of 238 086 employees since April 2020. Direct payments to employees have not been affected by the new measures.

However, over the weekend, it resumed payments and disbursed over R372 million in claims.

The payment covered claims for April and May lodged by 15 866 employers, benefitting 78 283 employees where banking details passed the verification process.

Further payments were done on Tuesday morning (July 14) with some R295 million paid out from 1 824 employers, benefitting 76 078 workers.

This brings the total amount paid since April 16 to date to just under R30 billion, to 6 789 695 workers, from 539 953 employers.