Pe­ter D Nep­tune

Near­ly 6,000 per­sons will be elim­i­nat­ed from the gov­ern­ment's smart card pro­gramme af­ter a re­view of the sys­tem re­vealed that near­ly one out of five re­cip­i­ents did not meet the cri­te­ria for re­ceiv­ing gov­ern­ment sup­port.

In de­clar­ing that "the days of the Smart Man Card were over," So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter, Dr Amery Browne said Cab­i­net ap­proved ad­di­tion­al fund­ing for the pro­gramme re­ferred to as the Tar­get­ed Con­di­tion­al Cash Trans­fer Pro­gramme (TC­CTP), which pro­vid­ed sup­port for vul­ner­a­ble mem­bers of so­ci­ety, by trans­fer­ring funds to a deb­it card for the pur­chase of ba­sic food items. Dr Browne said there were some card hold­ers who were avoid­ing Min­istry of­fi­cials or were not avail­able when the sur­vey was be­ing con­duct­ed. Those per­sons will be re­moved from the data­base with­in three months un­less their case is re­viewed, and he urged per­sons who re­al­ly need­ed the sup­port to con­tact the Min­istry by Sep­tem­ber 18, to have their pro­file up­dat­ed and added to the data­base.

Speak­ing at the week­ly post Cab­i­net press brief­ing, Dr Browne said many of the loop­holes that al­lowed per­sons to take ad­van­tage of the sys­tem were closed as well as the cri­te­ria for ac­cess­ing the pro­gramme has al­so been up­dat­ed and strict­ly ap­plied, so more peo­ple need­ing help from the au­thor­i­ties will re­ceive it. He said many peo­ple in­ap­pro­pri­ate­ly re­ceived sup­port be­cause the cri­te­ria for en­ter­ing the pro­gramme was not as strin­gent, and the min­istry had al­so hired ad­di­tion­al staff to process new ap­pli­cants as well as vis­it homes to see first hand the liv­ing con­di­tions of re­cip­i­ents, to en­sure that gov­ern­ment funds are prop­er­ly tar­get­ed. He not­ed that Cab­i­net had ap­proved his re­quest for the fi­nan­cial ben­e­fit of the card be in­creased by about 35 per­cent. This in­clud­ed in­creas­es in trans­fers from $300 to $410 for homes with three per­sons. For house­holds with more than six mem­bers, the ben­e­fit will in­crease from $500 to $700.

He not­ed that gov­ern­ment has spent $61 mil­lion on the project thus far, and the state is ex­pect­ing to in­crease that al­lo­ca­tion in the up­com­ing Na­tion­al Bud­get. He not­ed that gov­ern­ment has al­so bud­get­ed an ad­di­tion­al $270,000 for a so­cial aware­ness pro­gramme to alert per­sons who may qual­i­fy for help to con­tact the Min­istry. Min­is­ter Browne de­fend­ed the suc­cess­es of the project thus far, say­ing that the gov­ern­ment had a prece­dent for adopt­ing tech­nol­o­gy to reach out to dis­ad­van­taged per­sons. He said the pro­gramme gained high prais­es in Chile, for tak­ing many peo­ple on the fringes and on the pover­ty line out of dif­fi­cul­ties, and help­ing them through un­til they can fend for them­selves.