Some 341 tourism stipend recipients are yet receive their payments, which is dependent on their completion of the Labour Ministry’s survey that assesses their employment status and determines what stipend amount they’re entitled to receive.
Those individuals will not be paid until the survey is completed, Labour Ministry Chief Officer Wesley Howell has confirmed.
Howell, speaking on Wednesday’s episode of the Cayman Compass talkshow ‘The Resh Hour’, said initially 671 people had not done the survey as required to continue on the programme.
“Those persons are coming in now and we’ve deployed some additional personnel… and we will actually have a system entering the information in the survey there. Persons that have the capability to do it from their homes can do that as well. We are committed to getting those turned around as quickly as we can,” Howell said.
By Thursday evening, that figure had dropped to 341, the Compass was told.
Completing the survey is a requirement from the ministry and is used to determine whether recipients will receive the full $1500 stipend or the reduced amount of $1000, based on whether they are back to full employment or not.
“I just appeal to anybody that hasn’t done that survey yet to come in and get their information updated so that we can go ahead and process their payments,” Howell said Wednesday evening.
A number of complaints over delays in payments have been circulating in the community and on Wednesday the ministry confirmed the aim had been to issue this month’s payment on 17 Feb. However, a spokesperson for the ministry said various factors, including people providing incorrect bank details or changing bank details, were responsible for the delay.
It comes as it was announced last week that some 625 recipients who are now fully employed will receive a reduced payment of $1,000 this month and $750 next month.
Howell said some people, when they had the opportunity to fill out the survey, entered new banking details and in some cases, the account numbers were not correct.
“So those persons, we’re proactively calling to say, your issue is related to that information that we have, so we’ll continue to process those and our goal is to have this done as quickly as possible. I feel the pain of the people, so we want to get it done,” Howell assured.
The ministry had said due to the high volume of enquiries being received, more staff were added “to assist with answering queries about the stipend payments and process updates to banking information”.
Howell said as the information comes in from the survey, the payments will be finalised.
“We [will] go through and process. So depending on what their current information is, their current situation, we’ll either go with the $1,500 stipend if they’re still not fully employed or, if they are, then the government has agreed on the $1000 for February for those persons. So one of the two payments would go through,” Howell said.
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