Why Your UIF uFiling Claim Could Not Be Submitted

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The uFiling system allows for seamless access to the services offered by the UIF. However, the system has been offline which has been labelled as a nightmare. 


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The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) recently expressed their frustration at the prolonged outage of the Unemployment Insurance Fund's (UIF) online system, uFiling. 

The system has been offline for over a month, causing significant inconvenience to employers and workers alike. 

The UIF is crucial in providing short-term financial relief to workers facing unemployment or inability to work due to specific circumstances. 

UIF contributors submit claims to the UIF in several different circumstances including unemployment, illness leave, parental leave, adoption leave, reduced work time and maternity leave. The UIF also pays benefits to dependents of deceased UIF contributors.

uFiling offers several benefits, including the ability to submit claims and payment requests for various UIF benefits, view claims history, submit a notice of appeal, and check your employee declaration status. Additionally, users can declare and pay UIF contributions, verify if their returns are up to date, and submit both monthly and annual returns.

The main selling point of using uFiling is that employees can access the UIF services from the comfort of their homes at a convenient time However, this convenience has not been available. 

According to COSATU, the initial explanation provided by the UIF indicating that the system was down due to planned maintenance is inaccurate. 

The real reason behind the outage is a legal dispute involving two contractors vying for the UIF's services. The interdict granted to the original contractor has prevented the new service provider from taking over, leaving the system in limbo.

The real reason the digital platform is not available is due to a contractor that successfully interdicted another from rendering the same service it previously provided to UIF. 

While the UIF has implemented temporary measures to mitigate the impact of the system’s downtime like extended operating hours and manual claims processing, the union says these measures are insufficient.

They explain that employers who rely heavily on the uFiling platform have been forced to resort to manual processes, which are time-consuming and costly. 

Changing how a company declares its UIF contributions is no simple matter as it involves changing processes and will likely result in extra costs. Plus, only payments done via uFiling reflect immediately. Employers have complained that UIF takes too long to allocate EFT payments.  

However, it's not only employers who have been negatively impacted by the system being offline. COSATU says workers seeking unemployment benefits have also faced significant challenges, including long queues and difficulties in obtaining necessary documentation.

COSATU has criticised the UIF for its lack of responsiveness to the situation, particularly in the face of the ongoing challenges faced by workers who desperately need UIF assistance. 

UIF officials do not seem to comprehend that for a worker who has lost their job, obtaining taxi fare to travel to the UIF centre could prove challenging, consequently they have no qualms telling people to “come back tomorrow

The federation has called on the Minister of Employment and Labour, Nomakhosazana Meth, to intervene and ensure that the uFiling system is restored to full functionality.

"The Federation is calling on Minister Meth to intervene and take the necessary steps to ensure that uFiling is functional again and serving the people of South Africa because UIF is a contributory social security fund, and having it be offline for this long is simply unacceptable."

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