What’s happening at the SA Unemployment Insurance Fund?

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RYK VAN NIEKERK: Over the past few weeks I have received numerous enquiries from listeners about the state of affairs at the Unemployment Insurance Fund. The fund’s mandate is to provide short-term financial relief to South Africans when they lose their jobs, or cannot work owing to maternity leave or illness. The enquiries were mostly complaints from people who have been waiting for months for payout, and they described the administrative process as an ‘absolute nightmare’.

I also posted on social media yesterday and announced that I would speak to the commissioner of the fund about the apparent problems. The response has also been overwhelmingly negative, and it is clear that many people are not being paid speedily and that there is much frustration about the administrative process.

Teboho Maruping is on the line. He is the commissioner of the Unemployment Insurance Fund. Tebo, thank you so much for joining me today.  Just for some context, how many claims does the UIF receive during a typical month, and how many payments do you make in a typical month?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Well, the number of claims varies. We can receive up to maybe 50 000 per month, and then on top of that 50 000 we would be paying – as we did in December – about 200 000 payments, which we made in December alone. So it varies, depending on the economic activities during that period.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: Do you have a prescribed timeline in which you are supposed to make UIF payments to claimants? Is there a set timeline which you aim to achieve?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Yes. We take our processes through three different strategies, and each benefit type has a timeline. For example, a ‘deceased’ payment takes about 20 days, a maternity [payment] takes 10 days, and an unemployment benefit takes 15 days.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: And do you achieve those timelines?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Right now we’re sitting at around an 85% to a 90% achievement of our target.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: Well, I’ve received many complaints about some payments taking sometimes more than a year to be made. I also posted on social media yesterday where I said I was going to talk to you, and the reaction was also very, very negative. People say it’s very, very difficult to deal with the UIF, and that payments are really, really late. Are those outliers or, as you’ve just indicated, 85% seems to be a good time [within which] to make these payments. But why do you think there are some people that are really unhappy with the performance of the UIF?

TEBOHO MARUPING: I think our greatest challenge as an institution is compliance, and the second one is fraud. And in the midst of compliance there are people who take advantage and want to defraud the system. What also transpired was that during Covid there were people who applied for Covid fraudulently, and those people have been flagged.

If you apply from that campaign that is flagged, we don’t process your payment, we hold it. Or you’ll find that there are people who’ve applied, for example, for a Sassa grant – and if you apply for a Sassa grant you are not supposed to be employed. If that has been the case you are also flagged. So there are a number of issues that would cause a claim not to be processed on time.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: So from the 15% which you do not pay within the time period you’ve alluded to earlier, do you have any research on how many of those claims are fraudulent?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Well, the second one [fraud] could constitute about 5% of that population. And the remainder of the 15% is predominantly issues of non-compliance.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: The administrative process also seems to be a nightmare. How efficient do you think that that administrative system is?

TEBOHO MARUPING: I think 85% to 90% is a reflection of just how effective we are, and I believe we can do much better. In fact, by the end of January this year, we’re going to introduce the UIF and the USSD [Unstructured Supplementary Service Data] platform, just to simplify our processes even further.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: I’m looking at some of the complaints I have received. One lady says she’s been waiting for more than a year for a payment and she has not received any communication from the UIF. Another one says: ‘I’m waiting six months. I’ve tried to follow up on a claim and it was just not administered. I just cannot get clarity on why it has not been approved.’ How big is your call centre, for example, to handle these complaints?

TEBOHO MARUPING: The good thing is initially we had about 50 agents when we started, and then we transferred our call centre. We employed a service provider, who has about 500 call-centre agents, because we understood that the number of calls that we are receiving had increased and that’s why we increased the number of agents to 500 agents.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: Do you have 500 agents currently?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Yes, 500 agents now. That’s the extent [to which] we’ve now improved access [for] the public.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: Do you have any performance metrics to monitor how efficient payments are towards people – especially the 15% which you do not pay within the time periods, the 15 and 20 days you alluded to earlier?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Yes. Oftentimes we would give the client a maximum of 14 days to fix whatever it is that we may have picked up. But some of the employers  are hard to find. Take, for example, you’ve been working for this radio station, in particular, but your previous employer did not declare you. That means when you come and apply, we need to fix those credits and then even go to the previous employer. Or else, if we were to pay you with your current state of affairs – the credits that you might have at that point in time – we could pay you a very small amount. And that’s not what UIF is about. It is about making sure that people survive during the most difficult time of either being on maternity [leave] or unemployment, and not pay you R5 when we can pay you R2 000.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: I see the SMSes are streaming in where people say, ‘Listen, we’ve been waiting for months and months’. What is your message to people who say they’ve been waiting for more than a year for a payout? How should they address that problem?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Okay, I’m trying to see if I can give you our call centre number. Are you still there, sir?

RYK VAN NIEKERK: I’m here. I’ll Google the call centre number now. But what is your advice? To phone the call centre?

TEBOHO MARUPING: Yes, they must phone the call centre and when they phone the call centre the cases are escalated to a well-functioning office that will attend to their cases.

RYK VAN NIEKERK: Well, we’ll have to leave it there – ‘a well-functioning call centre’. Sir, thank you so much for your time. I think we may refer some of these complaints to your office and hopefully they will be resolved soon.

That was Teboho Maruping, the commissioner of the Unemployment Insurance Fund.