More Applications are Approved and Accepted for Unemployment Relief

The number of persons who lost their jobs due to COVID-19 is in the thousands, though the exact number is still out there. For sure, close to eighty-three thousand applied for COVID-19 Unemployment Relief.  The Oversight Committee of the Unemployment Relief has approved about forty-five percent of the applicants to date. Here is an update with News Five’s Isani Cayetano.

Isani Cayetano, Reporting

A total of thirty-seven thousand, six hundred and ninety-six applicants have received financial assistance through the Social Security Board under government’s unemployment relief programme.  To date, the Employment Oversight Team led by Dr. Carla Barnett and Christopher Coye have approved a little over forty thousand applications.  Despite SSB continuing to process payments, thousands of payments have been returned because banks and credit unions are reporting that incorrect banking information was provided by the applicants.  While some of the three thousand payments have been rectified, there are still two thousand, six hundred payments that are outstanding due to these errors.  On Tuesday, recipients of the COVID-19 Unemployment relief were advised to safeguard their top up cards and personal identification numbers because those cards will be used to receive additional payments during the remainder of the approved unemployment relief period.  Likewise, recipients are also encouraged to work with persons calling to rectify banking information in respect of the incorrect forms.  A ten dollar fee has been tacked on to all replacement of these top up cards.