Only 90 flood grant cheques distributed as ministry finds errors, discrepancies

Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices (MoS­DFS) has re­ceived more than 4,000 ap­pli­ca­tions for flood re­lief grants since Oc­to­ber and has dis­trib­uted rough­ly 90 cheques to date.

This is ac­cord­ing to MoS­DFS Min­is­ter Don­na Cox who told Guardian Me­dia that few cheques were dis­trib­uted be­cause of the vet­ting nec­es­sary for the ap­pli­ca­tions.

Minister of Social Development and Family Services Donna Cox

Office of the Parliament

“We have found some dis­crep­an­cies in some of the ap­pli­ca­tions and that would slow down the process where there are some per­sons (who) ap­plied more than once,” she said.

“As a mat­ter of fact, we found one per­son who ap­plied 70-some­thing times. I do not know if it was a mis­take or if they didn’t un­der­stand.”

She said oth­er ap­pli­cants ap­plied mul­ti­ple times us­ing their mid­dle names. She said there were al­so sev­er­al in­stances of in­for­ma­tion be­ing omit­ted from the forms.

“So the min­istry is call­ing them to get that in­for­ma­tion. But the staff has been pro­cess­ing it. Some per­sons have been ap­ply­ing elec­tron­i­cal­ly so that has helped us to fast-track the process,” she said.

Due to this, Cox said she was not able to give a time­line of when dis­tri­b­u­tions could be ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed. Cox was un­able to give a mon­e­tary val­ue for the cheques dis­trib­uted so far but said it will be pro­vid­ed lat­er in the week.