The UIF relief scheme was only intended as a stop-gap measure for the three months ended June 2020.
The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) temporary employer/employee relief scheme (TERS) will not be paying claims made in July. UIF Commissioner Teboho Maruping said in a recent statement that this was in accordance with the directive issued by Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi on 26 March 2020, which indicated that the Covid-19 TERS benefits were only meant to last for a period of three months.
This is because the payments were intended as a stop-gap measure for a period of three months or until such time that lockdown restrictions were eased and the economy slowly reopened.
"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. 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," said the commissioner.
The Commissioner also indicated that while the Fund will accept the claims for the determined period, at the moment they were experiencing some technical glitches with the opening of the system for June submissions.?
The main problem is with the swapping of employer profiles when users try to submit claims, which causes a potential security breach.
"We initially opened the system for June application on 23 June 2020, and our aim was to start making the first payments on the 25th of June to ensure that employees do not wait too long for their salaries. Unfortunately, we experienced problems with the swapping of user profiles and we immediately shut it down for June and rolled back to May to fix the problem."?
