Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

The Min­istry of Fi­nance has so far paid out 74,549 Salary Re­lief Grants with a to­tal val­ue of $112 mil­lion, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert stat­ed in a tweet yes­ter­day.

Those pay­ments com­prised 28,948 for April, 24836 for May, and 20,765 for June, Im­bert stat­ed.

In March Im­bert an­nounced the es­tab­lish­ment of a Salary Re­lief Grant of $1,500 a month for three months to help cush­ion the eco­nom­ic im­pact of the strin­gent ac­tion be­ing tak­en by the gov­ern­ment to bat­tle the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

Im­bert said the SRG was es­tab­lished to help those whose em­ploy­ment would have been af­fect­ed by the pan­dem­ic and the re­stric­tions put in place.

He said that the grant would be ex­pect­ed to help over 80,000 cit­i­zens and es­ti­mat­ed that it would cost tax­pay­ers around $400 mil­lion.

The Salary Re­lief Grant was el­i­gi­ble for peo­ple reg­is­tered in the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Sys­tem.

Speak­ing in the Par­lia­ment in June, Im­bert re­vealed that out of the 51,000 ap­pli­ca­tions that were re­ceived for the Salary Re­lief Grant not all of the ap­pli­ca­tions were valid.

“I would say that based on the in­for­ma­tion that I have re­ceived ap­prox­i­mate­ly 20 per cent of the ap­pli­ca­tions re­ceived are not valid for one rea­son or an­oth­er. These would be per­sons who may have been out of em­ploy­ment long be­fore the March 19 pub­li­ca­tion of the first pub­lic health re­stric­tions or per­sons who are not with­in the NIS sys­tem, or per­sons who are not cit­i­zens of Trinidad and To­ba­go,” Im­bert said.

Im­bert said the process of deal­ing with the queries re­lat­ed to the Salary Re­lief Grant is on­go­ing.

“Res­o­lu­tion of queried SRG ap­pli­ca­tions con­tin­ues and ap­pli­ca­tions will soon be re-in­vit­ed from re­cent­ly af­fect­ed sec­tors,” Im­bert tweet­ed.