The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A Cabinet minister yesterday said he has been informed that almost 4,000 persons were illegally collecting jobless benefits during COVID-19 while still employed

Myles Laroda, minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office with responsibility for the National Insurance Board (NIB), said “no decision” on what will happen to those caught “double dipping” - including whether they will be required to pay the monies back - has been taken.

And he indicated that the Government and NIB were grappling with other COVID-related issues, namely whether long-furloughed workers who have now been made redundant can claim full unemployment benefits from the social security scheme given that their contributions are not up-to-date.

Referring to “some issues with Atlantis”, Mr Laroda explained: “Employees who have been terminated, the Act would require that for you to benefit or collect unemployment benefits, you would have had to have made contributions for the 52 weeks previous.

“Well, we have individuals who were off for over a year, and even when those redundancies were paid, if you are line staff that would only be in the amount of 26 weeks. So those individuals were not working. When they did get their severance, only 24 weeks worth of contributions were made, so they left at a deficit.

“So that’s going to be a policy decision that the Government will have to make with regards to how we are going to bring unemployment relief to individuals who really were not physically on the job.” Mr Laroda said there are “thousands” of individuals caught in this situation where they were left unemployed, but did not make enough contributions to qualify to receive NIB benefits.

As for potential fraud, he added: “My advice that I would have received was that there were over 3,000, and almost 4,000, people who NIB would have found out from contributions that were made on their behalf from their employers, and that’s why we said they were collecting benefits while they were not legally able to do so.

“It’s an ongoing issue because, yet again, we’re talking about individuals who would have received their redundancy packages and would have been on that list that contributions were made on their behalf. So it’s not fair to them to say that they were double dipping because they were at home, not working.

“They got their severance packages. Some of those were garnished by creditors, and so if you got a payment, your contributions were paid, you got nothing from it and you are not eligible to receive benefits from NIB. That is hard to say that is double dipping.”