The Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) provides a range of benefits to contributors who have lost income. These benefits cover individuals for illness leave, maternity leave, reduced work time, adoption leave and parental leave.
The Fund announced that they have reintroduced a verification process which they believe will go a long way in preventing corruption and fraudulent activity related to the UIF’s services.
The reintroduction of this verification process has since resulted in a significant drop in daily payouts. Before the verification process was reintroduced in June, the fund was paying out R90 million in benefits. This has now dropped to around R50 million.
UIF Commissioner, Teboho Maruping says the fund noticed a significant rise in corrupt activities where claims with significantly higher amounts are quickly processed and paid. A pattern soon emerged where these claims tended to be the same amount, processed from the same areas and without source documents.
Maruping says the UIF now insists that all processed claims, particularly those with huge amounts, must be subjected to verifications before payments are released. They urged all beneficiaries to be patient as the UIF works to ensure benefits are paid to deserving individuals.
In 2020, they introduced the Covid-19 Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) benefits. These benefits aimed to supplement the income of individuals who lost a portion or all their income due to the Covid-19 related lockdowns.
The UIF paid more than R63 billion in TERS benefits. However, the fund detected a high volume of fraudulent claims and are working to recover as much money as possible.
In efforts to recover money stolen from the UIF, they launched the Follow The Money campaign.
In June, around R3.4 was voluntarily returned to fund. Maruping attributed this to the Follow The Money campaign as well as the prosecution of individuals who abused the TERS scheme.
