The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) is finalising its testing process on the Covid-19 TERS online application system in preparation for the new intake of the May 2020 relief benefit claims.
Since the inception of the system on 16 April 2020, UIF has processed more than 200 000 valid claims from employers with more than 2.5 million employees benefiting from the more than R14-billion paid so far.
With the move to alert level 4 of the Coronavirus lockdown, some businesses have resumed operations either in full or in part. With this change, the UIF expects employers to submit claims in varying degrees since some will either claim for all employees or part of them. Therefore, the UIF had to reconfigure its system to accommodate various scenarios pertaining to May applications.
Testing will be finalised over the weekend and the plan is to open the May 2020 claims early next week. Employers applying for the first time will be expected to register on the uifecc.labour.gov.za portal and follow the rest of the steps. Repeat employers submitting claims for May will be expected to submit proof of payment to employees for the payments made in April 2020.
Social partners at NEDLAC have endorsed the plan by the UIF to ramp up payment of funds directly into the employees’ bank accounts.
“We have received numerous complaints from employees about not receiving their salaries even after UIF has made payments to their employers. This and other reasons prompted the Department to appeal to the social partners at Nedlac to allow UIF to deposit funds directly into employees’ bank accounts”, says UIF Commissioner Teboho Maruping.
Maruping said that even though the UIF will be paying directly into employees’ bank accounts, employers are still expected to apply on behalf of their employees. He said the employers will still receive the payment breakdown from UIF as confirmation of payment to employees.
The system has also been enhanced to allow users to edit banking details for those employees whose payments were declined due to Bank verification or branch code errors.
To date the UIF has processed 204 177 valid claims from employers at a value of just under R14.5-billion (R14 473 283 036.84) for the benefit of 2 633 834 workers around the country.
For more information contact:
Makhosonke Buthelezi
Director: UIF Communication
082359 5584 or 071 491 7236
