The Min­istry of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices has con­firmed the com­ple­tion of cheque print­ing and prepa­ra­tion for na­tion­wide dis­tri­b­u­tion fol­low­ing a tem­po­rary de­lay in the so­cial ser­vices pay­ment process.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry, cit­i­zens re­ceiv­ing pay­ments through di­rect de­posit were not af­fect­ed. The is­sue arose from a me­chan­i­cal fail­ure of the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Board of Trinidad and To­ba­go (NIBTT) cheque-print­ing ma­chine.

The Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple, So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices was no­ti­fied of the sit­u­a­tion on Sep­tem­ber 24, and the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance was in­formed the same day to fa­cil­i­tate im­me­di­ate ac­tion. A pub­lic ad­vi­so­ry was is­sued on 26th Sep­tem­ber.

The Min­istry stat­ed that the de­lay oc­curred when a crit­i­cal ma­chine part failed and a re­place­ment part, ex­pect­ed on 26th Sep­tem­ber, ar­rived on 30th Sep­tem­ber but was found in­com­pat­i­ble with the ex­ist­ing sys­tem. A new part was sourced over­seas, de­liv­ered, and in­stalled by 2nd Oc­to­ber, restor­ing full op­er­a­tions.

The Min­istry con­firmed that more than 14,000 cheques and 6,000 life cer­tifi­cates were de­liv­ered for kit­ting on Thurs­day, with re­main­ing cheques to be com­plet­ed by the end of the day. The con­sign­ment is to be se­cure­ly stored be­fore be­ing hand­ed over to TTPOST for sort­ing and na­tion­wide dis­tri­b­u­tion be­gin­ning Mon­day, 6th Oc­to­ber, 2025.

The Gov­ern­ment stat­ed that out­dat­ed equip­ment and ne­glect­ed up­grades from pre­vi­ous years con­tributed to the is­sue. The Min­istry reaf­firmed its com­mit­ment to mod­ern­iz­ing sys­tems to en­sure con­ti­nu­ity in the de­liv­ery of so­cial ser­vices.