The Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) is ques­tion­ing the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion’s claim that 95 per cent of back­pay owed to ac­tive teach­ers has been dis­bursed, say­ing it has not re­ceived the in­for­ma­tion need­ed to ver­i­fy the fig­ure.

In a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day, TTUTA Pres­i­dent Crys­tal Ashe said the min­istry had not pro­vid­ed the as­so­ci­a­tion with da­ta on the num­ber of serv­ing and re­tired ed­u­ca­tors who had re­ceived out­stand­ing salary ar­rears for the 2020–2023 pe­ri­od.

The min­istry, in a state­ment on Fri­day, said 95 per cent of back­pay pay­ments to ac­tive teach­ers had al­ready been dis­bursed, de­scrib­ing this as sub­stan­tial progress in set­tling out­stand­ing salary ar­rears.

It said it was con­tin­u­ing to work with TTUTA to iden­ti­fy and re­solve out­stand­ing cas­es, in­clud­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive or pay­ment-re­lat­ed dis­crep­an­cies that may have af­fect­ed the re­main­ing dis­burse­ments.

The min­istry al­so as­sured teach­ers whose pay­ments re­mained out­stand­ing that the mat­ter was re­ceiv­ing at­ten­tion and that ef­forts were be­ing made to re­solve them as quick­ly as pos­si­ble.

How­ev­er, TTUTA said more than 200 of its mem­bers con­tact­ed the as­so­ci­a­tion af­ter fail­ing to re­ceive their ar­rears when pay­ments were made in 2026.

It added that there could al­so be non-mem­bers who had not re­ceived their out­stand­ing pay­ments.

The as­so­ci­a­tion said an agree­ment was reached be­tween the Chief Per­son­nel Of­fi­cer and TTUTA in April 2025 for the pay­ments to be made by Ju­ly that year, but this did not ma­te­ri­alise.

TTUTA said the agree­ment would have giv­en the min­istry more than a year to com­plete the nec­es­sary checks and cal­cu­la­tions to en­sure all el­i­gi­ble ed­u­ca­tors were paid.

The as­so­ci­a­tion main­tained that every el­i­gi­ble ed­u­ca­tor must re­ceive the mon­ey owed to them and said it looked for­ward to the time­ly res­o­lu­tion of all out­stand­ing pay­ments.