Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

The So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­istry’s pro­cess­ing of as­sis­tance grants for per­sons af­fect­ed by the No­vem­ber 2022 floods was de­layed by “du­pli­ca­tion night­mares,” where peo­ple made mul­ti­ple ap­pli­ca­tions—in­clud­ing one ap­pli­cant who ap­plied 74 times and where oth­er “af­fect­ed” ap­pli­cants sent pic­tures of the same so­fa more than once.

So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Don­na Cox re­vealed this in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, while re­ply­ing to queries from UNC Sen­a­tor Wade Mark. He’d asked Cox to ad­vise whether ad­di­tion­al so­cial as­sis­tance will be pro­vid­ed to sup­port the thou­sands of cit­i­zens neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed by the No­vem­ber 2022 flood­ing.

Cox de­tailed the eight types of grants and ser­vices the min­istry is au­tho­rised to of­fer per­sons who have been af­fect­ed by nat­ur­al and man­made dis­as­ters, in­clud­ing flood re­lief. She said the min­istry, as a con­se­quence of the No­vem­ber 2022 flood­ing, pri­ori­tised pro­vi­sion of three forms of dis­as­ter re­lief as­sis­tance in the first in­stance—Tem­po­rary Food Sup­port, House­hold Items Grant and the School Sup­plies Grant.

Cox added, “How­ev­er, the min­istry, notwith­stand­ing its gen­uine ef­forts, ex­pe­ri­enced a num­ber of chal­lenges.”

She list­ed:

• Mul­ti­ple per­sons from the same house­hold ap­ply­ing for grants that are lim­it­ed to one per house­hold, such as the House­hold Items Grant. This led to the min­istry hav­ing to un­der­take ad­di­tion­al ver­i­fi­ca­tion pro­ce­dures to de­ter­mine the house­hold com­po­si­tion.

• Miss­ing or in­ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion cap­tured on the as­sess­ments com­plet­ed by the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment, which re­sult­ed in the need for ad­di­tion­al ver­i­fi­ca­tion/val­i­da­tion.

• Per­sons who were af­fect­ed made mul­ti­ple ap­pli­ca­tions, which cre­at­ed a du­pli­ca­tion night­mare which de­layed pro­cess­ing.

• In­abil­i­ty to con­tact ap­pli­cants due to changes in their tele­phone con­tact in­for­ma­tion which cre­at­ed the need for an of­fi­cer to vis­it the area to lo­cate the clients.

Cox added, “We know there were many du­pli­ca­tions, for ex­am­ple one per­son ap­plied 74 times.”

Oth­er in­for­ma­tion in­clud­ed:

• Val­i­dat­ed for ap­proval of house­hold items and school sup­plies grants—1,298

• Re­ject­ed due to com­mer­cial prop­er­ty, in­sured prop­er­ty, mul­ti­ple claims from the same house­hold, no re­cov­ery needs—582

• Re­ferred for a fur­ther field vis­it ver­i­fi­ca­tion due to in­con­sis­tent or miss­ing in­for­ma­tion and sup­port­ing ev­i­dence—274

• Val­i­dat­ed/re­ferred for oth­er grants such as NS­DP re­pair grants, Cloth­ing and Rental As­sis­tance Grants—384

• Queries: Dis­as­ter Man­age­ment Unit as­sess­ment queries and sus­pect­ed fraud­u­lent claims—57

• Du­pli­cate ap­pli­ca­tions—147

Cox said as of Feb­ru­ary 10, 2023, the min­istry had processed ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50.3 per cent or 2,742 of the 5,454 ap­pli­ca­tions re­ceived for dis­as­ter re­lief dur­ing Oc­to­ber, 2022 to De­cem­ber 2022.

Of those out­stand­ing ap­pli­ca­tions and what’s be­ing processed to pro­vide the grants, Cox said that was around 900, “Be­cause some were re­ject­ed be­cause of the chal­lenges. For in­stance, in some in­for­ma­tion that was pro­vid­ed to us, we saw the same so­fa in pic­tures more than once, as per­sons hav­ing been ‘af­fect­ed’. So, we had to do some elim­i­na­tion process­es.”

“We tried to get on to some peo­ple to ver­i­fy and get cor­rect in­for­ma­tion be­fore ap­proval and that was dif­fi­cult for some. Al­so, the du­pli­ca­tion al­so caused a clog of the sys­tem, where they had to go over every­thing to en­sure that peo­ple were el­i­gi­ble for graphs—that was part of it.”