This is an appeal to public servants in Government ministries, Statutory bodies and all Government agencies, please remember, you are first and foremost servants of the public! Have a heart, start preparing the necessary paperwork for your retirees at least two years in advance! No public servant should be forced to wait two years, some more, for their benefits!
After the unrepentant, callous disregard displayed by staff on the Pensions Unit on January 21, 2015, I feel burdened to put pen to paper. How else does one describe one clerk to service some 20-odd people, from different walks of life and different parts of the country? Some coming from Tobago, braving the Carnival madness, the traffic, to present themselves for the sole purpose of enquiring about their benefits and having to wait for hours only to be told, "We now get back October applications from the Auditor General. Yours went in December so that eh come back yet."
The horror stories you hear while waiting are unbelievable! Why can't I check/track the movement of my application by simply logging on to a Web site? Why can't the TTConnect service be utilised to this end?This is the unit where retirees must come to follow up on payments due to them, some after as many as 40 years of service. The majority of such people would have been employed by the State and are therefore very dependent on such monies to meet their outstanding obligations, not to mention their day-to-day living and medical expenses.
The majority of people employed in this unit appear to be young and healthy. Their life experiences are as yet not tainted by unheralded circumstances, medical or otherwise. We, the retirees know only too well the perils of being caught in the vise of financial institutions, waiting like vultures for us to miss a payment, or become ill to serve us with legal letters or worse yet, seize our hard-earned assets.
These young public servants appear to be devoid of any empathy for the circumstances facing us, the retirees. What would it take to galvanise them to treat people like myself with more respect and to get them to perform their duties more expeditiously?
Lamentably, it is only when these very people are themselves in my position, only then will they understand and appreciate what they are putting hundreds like me through. My conscience is clear, in that I always knew that I was a servant of the public and always kept this in mind as I performed my duties. Sadly, many have dishonoured that responsibility and brought the Public Service into disrepute. Would to God that the head of the public service would seek to reverse the rot!
Another welcome initiative would be to produce a booklet detailing the documents and processes required to process retiree benefits and make this available online to all employees, whether employed in the private sector or the public sector. The scrap of paper provided at the Pensions Unit is totally unacceptable in this day and age, not to mention not being enviro-friendly.
Y Davidson,
Centeno