Gail Alexan­der

Gov­ern­ment will be giv­ing church­es and re­li­gious bod­ies $30 mil­lion over the next three months to dis­trib­ute to the poor and needy - and some salary re­lief grants may be out by to­mor­row, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert an­nounced that in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day.

De­tail­ing fur­ther steps in Gov­ern­ment’s pro­vi­sion of mea­sures to as­sist sec­tors amid the COVID-19 cri­sis, Im­bert said it was ac­knowl­edged that con­tain­ment mea­sures re­gard­ing the virus would have a most se­vere eco­nom­ic fall­out on some of T&T’s ma­jor em­ploy­ment-cre­at­ing sec­tors from tourism and con­struc­tion to agri­cul­ture.

“We’ve re­spond­ed quick­ly with a broad set of pol­i­cy mea­sures aimed at pro­vid­ing so­cial pro­tec­tion, as­sist­ing the poor and vul­ner­a­ble, pro­tect­ing busi­ness­es, jobs and in­comes, main­tain­ing fi­nan­cial re­silience and sus­tain­ing eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty,” Im­bert said.

He said Gov­ern­ment yes­ter­day de­cid­ed to ex­pand the reach of its food sup­port pro­grammes by en­list­ing the as­sis­tance of church­es and re­li­gious bod­ies.

“Grants to­talling $10 mil­lion per month for three months, May, June and Ju­ly, will be giv­en to re­li­gious bod­ies in pro­por­tion to the size of their con­gre­ga­tions for them to dis­trib­ute food to the poor and needy in ac­cor­dance with their ex­ist­ing pro­ce­dures and pro­grammes. This will cost $30 mil­lion,” Im­bert said.

“A fur­ther $10 mil­lion per month for food sup­port will be giv­en to the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment for dis­tri­b­u­tion with­in the 14 mu­nic­i­pal re­gions in Trinidad, for the months of May, June and Ju­ly, at a cost of a fur­ther $30 mil­lion.”

The em­pha­sis in food sup­port pro­grammes will be placed on fresh pro­duce and tra­di­tion­al processed foods.

He al­so said his min­istry is well ad­vanced with arrange­ments for the pay­ment of Salary Re­lief Grants for per­sons reg­is­tered for Na­tion­al In­sur­ance and whose em­ploy­ment had been ter­mi­nat­ed or sus­pend­ed with­out pay as a re­sult of the Pub­lic Health Reg­u­la­tions. Grants are for as much as $1,500 month­ly for up to three months.

“As of March 24, some 30,300 ap­pli­ca­tions for Salary Re­lief Grants were re­ceived, com­pris­ing 11,452 hand-de­liv­ered ap­pli­ca­tions from TTPost lo­ca­tions and 18,758 ap­pli­ca­tions re­ceived on­line. Ear­li­er es­ti­mates of on­line ap­pli­ca­tions giv­en to us, which were based on the as­sumed byte size of a typ­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tion, proved to be in­ac­cu­rate,” he said.

“For those who aren’t In­ter­net savvy, the sta­tis­tics now jus­ti­fy the use of po­lice sta­tions for the phys­i­cal col­lec­tion of forms and TTPost of­fices for the drop-off of com­plet­ed ap­pli­ca­tions. Work is be­ing done on the first batch of 1,000 salary re­lief grants.”

He added, “If all goes ac­cord­ing to plan, these grants will be wired to re­cip­i­ents (Tues­day) and ar­rive in their bank ac­counts by (to­mor­row). There­after, we ex­pect to be able to in­crease our ca­pac­i­ty to be able to process/de­liv­er up to 10,000 new grants week­ly.”

Grants are even­tu­al­ly ex­pect­ed to reach as many as 100,000 per­sons at a cost of $400 mil­lion.

Yes­ter­day, Gov­ern­ment al­so ini­ti­at­ed the process for a wire trans­fer of funds in the amount of $2,000 to T&T stu­dents at the UWI cam­pus­es in Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos who aren’t on na­tion­al schol­ar­ships. Oth­er stu­dents at re­gion­al uni­ver­si­ties, such as in Cu­ba, will al­so be as­sist­ed in due course.

Im­bert al­so signed an agree­ment yes­ter­day with bod­ies rep­re­sent­ing the cred­it union sec­tor to pro­vide them with $100 mil­lion in funds for loans up to $5,000 for mem­bers.

“We’re al­so in the fi­nal stages of prepar­ing a Gov­ern­ment-guar­an­teed soft loan pro­gramme for small/medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es, to be ad­min­is­tered through com­mer­cial banks.”

He said be­tween VAT re­funds and in­come tax re­funds, Gov­ern­ment will have paid out $700 mil­lion in cash in a two-month pe­ri­od, all de­signed to in­ject mon­ey in­to the econ­o­my.

“Ac­cel­er­at­ed pay­ment of Cor­po­ra­tion Tax re­funds is al­so be­ing se­ri­ous­ly con­sid­ered,” he said.

But Im­bert not­ed that where T&T’s labour force is es­ti­mat­ed at 620,000 per­sons, on­ly 420,000 per­sons are reg­is­tered for na­tion­al in­sur­ance in T&T.

“This means 200,000 per­sons or 32 per cent of our labour force are out­side of the for­mal sys­tem. This is a se­ri­ous mat­ter which must be ad­dressed when life gets back to nor­mal. It’s not fair to those per­sons who faith­ful­ly pay their tax­es and NIS con­tri­bu­tions for so many un­reg­is­tered work­ers to be out­side of the sys­tem.”