News

5,000 recipients likely to have their allowance suspended

July 31, 2020 5:36 am

Rupeni Fatiaki

Five thousand Social Welfare recipients stand to lose their monthly allowance from Saturday.

This has been revealed by the Social Welfare Department which says that these include those under the Social Pension, the Care and Protection and Poverty Benefit Schemes, who failed to submit their re-certification forms.

Director Rupeni Fatiaki says the deadline is today and those who fail to adhere will have their assistance suspended.

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“Those that have not and I will send this message again, we still have quite a number of people who have not return their forms, some of them have not even come to fill their forms and on that, come 1st of August, those that are not re-certified, we are going to suspend their allowances.”

Fatiaki says the new procedure was designed to curb abuse of the scheme as there were some families of recipients who continue to take the assistance despite the original recipient having passed on.

He says those whose accounts will be suspended will be given three months grace period to comply and get back on the scheme.

Fatiaki warns that failure to do so will result in their accounts being permanently terminated.

The Social Welfare Department has given out 66,000 forms and they have only received completed re-certification forms from 61,000 recipients.