People and Businesses Wait Longer and Longer for Much-Needed Redundancy Payments – Hayes
South Tipperary T.D. Tom Hayes called on the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation to act on the 33,000 individuals and businesses who are waiting since the end of 2009 for payment of redundancy claims and rebates.
Minister of State for Labour Affairs, Dara Calleary, has himself acknowledged to Tom Hayes T.D. that the delays are “unacceptable” as the department is now processing claims submitted last November and December. In total, 33,713 redundancy claims were still awaiting processing at the end of June.
Minister Calleary said in reply to a Parliamentary Question from Tom Hayes: “The backlog and waiting times remain at unacceptable levels. However, improvements are evident.
“The Minister’s contention that this has improved is blatantly untrue. The situation has, in fact, deteriorated since I raised it with the Department last year. In June of 2009, businesses were waiting four months for their rebates and this now stands at a wait of seven months.”
“It is unacceptable to ask a person who has been made redundant to wait this long for their redundancy payments to come through. Employees have diligently paid their contributions through their work and are being penalized for the performance of the business overall, if it has gone into liquidation or other situations like that.”
“Similarly, if a business has been forced to make workers redundant, then it clearly needs the cash-flow more than ever to keep afloat and expecting companies to wait for over six months for large sums of money is simply foolish from an economic point of view. This whole situation is unjust and placing undue pressure on people at a terrible time for them,” Tom Hayes said today.
This fund is set up to deal with two different payments – firstly, rebates to employers who have paid statutory redundancy to eligible employees; and secondly, statutory lump sums to employees whose employers are insolvent, in receivership or in liquidation. Responsibility for the handling of the payments is to be transferred to the Department of Social Protection in January.
“In the first six months of 2010, 40,527 claims were processed, up 115 per cent on the same period last year. This problem is not going away. A total of 77,001 claims were received by the department in 2009, which is a threefold increase those processed in 2007 and this just shows how badly our government is performing in terms of supporting business through this period. The government is not governing properly where it cannot administer statutory schemes like this and it must change as soon as possible,” Tom Hayes T.D.
