Akash Sama­roo

Less than ten per cent of peo­ple who ap­plied for fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance fol­low­ing last No­vem­ber’s flood­ing have re­ceived their cheques.

Min­is­ter of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices Don­na Cox said as of yes­ter­day (Jan­u­ary 17), 407 cheques had been print­ed to the val­ue of $2,996,500, with 374 more cheques val­i­dat­ed but await­ing fi­nal ap­proval.

How­ev­er, Cox ex­plained that her min­istry's ver­i­fi­ca­tion of­fi­cers have had to go back in­to the field to clear up in­con­sis­ten­cies or er­rors on peo­ple’s ap­pli­ca­tion forms.

“Some of the dis­as­ter as­sess­ment forms were miss­ing in­for­ma­tion such as ID card de­tails, con­tact in­for­ma­tion, where the wrong phone num­ber was giv­en, prop­er ad­dress, house­hold mem­ber in­for­ma­tion and ev­i­dence of the dis­as­ter,” Cox told Guardian Me­dia.

On Jan­u­ary 5, the Min­is­ter said up to 1,000 of the forms were ei­ther in­com­plete or need­ed to be queried.

The Min­is­ter, there­fore, urged the pub­lic to pay clos­er at­ten­tion to the re­quire­ments on the form.

Cox ad­vised, “In com­plet­ing the form, en­sure prop­er spelling of first and last name, en­sure that both front and back of ID card are clear­ly copied and vis­i­ble and the ID card num­ber on the form is cor­rect. Pro­vide the com­plete ad­dress for the res­i­den­tial prop­er­ty where the dis­as­ter hap­pened not just the area. En­sure that the phone num­ber is cor­rect and pro­vide an al­ter­na­tive con­tact num­ber just in case. Pro­vide the full and cor­rect names of the oth­er mem­bers of the house­hold. En­sure that any pic­tures of the dam­ages are clear. Please co­op­er­ate with the Min­istry's of­fi­cers when they make con­tact dur­ing the val­i­da­tion phase.”

How­ev­er, Val­sayn/St Joseph coun­cil­lor Seema Ram­saran-Au­gus­tine be­lieves the blame can­not be placed on the peo­ple be­cause as far as she saw, it was min­istry of­fi­cials who filled out the forms.

“I don’t un­der­stand this, peo­ple just gave them the in­for­ma­tion, so I don’t un­der­stand how they can say peo­ple left out ID num­ber and phone num­ber when they (min­istry of­fi­cials) were the ones who were ask­ing the ques­tions and fill­ing out the forms for the res­i­dents,”

Ram­saran-Au­gus­tine said.

Say­ing her dis­trict had around 300 im­pact­ed house­holds, she said if any mis­takes were made, it’s the fault of the gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials.

“Be­cause if I hand you my ID card and you fill­ing out a form for me, you must see the prop­er spelling of my name, you must see my ID card num­ber and then with the lev­el of flood­ing in the Bam­boo area for ex­am­ple, you have to use com­mon sense, all the per­sons flood­ed out there lost every­thing be­cause of the lev­el of wa­ter, so I re­al­ly don’t un­der­stand this right now.”

Ad­dress­ing this claim, how­ev­er, Cox said the coun­cil­lor's state­ment was un­true and most peo­ple filled out the forms them­selves. She added that on­ly those who re­quest­ed help were as­sist­ed by min­istry of­fi­cials.