100 000 cases of unpaid claims for injured workers
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has blocked the tabling of the financials of the Compensation Fund in Parliament.
|||Johannesburg - Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has blocked the tabling of the financials of the Compensation Fund in Parliament because he wanted to clean up the backlog of 100 000 cases of unpaid claims to injured workers.
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Motsoaledi said in a letter to Parliament that some of the unpaid claims date back to almost 20 years ago.
The backlog in the processing of claims to the injured mineworkers and other workers has led to delays in finalising and collating information on the state of the Compensation Fund.
He said a lot of work was being done to fix the state of the fund. At the moment actuarial valuation of the fund was being conducted.
Motsoaledi said the valuation report was expected in mid-August.
The auditor-general has also started his work in auditing the fund.
The minister said the previous financials of the Compensation Fund had adverse opinions from the auditor-general owing to missing beneficiary files and the AG not accepting the previous actuarial valuation of the fund.
They have done an extensive job in verifying hundreds of thousands of files from the Compensation Fund and the Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases.
“The verification exercise revealed that about 100 000 claimants had unpaid claims with about 45 percent going back to before the year 2000,” said Motsoaledi.
Unpaid claims to thousands of workers is one of the serious problems affecting the mineworkers and other workers in the country.
The Registrar of Pension Funds said last year there was R20 billion in the coffers of pension funds for unclaimed benefits.
This was mainly for workers who had lost contact with their pension funds or were untraceable after they went on retirement, were retrenched or dismissed.
These workers, mainly former mineworkers, were living in rural areas and did not know there were benefits due to them.
The Financial Services Board said in a report last year about 3.5 million people were owed the R20bn in unclaimed benefits.
It said one of the problems was that companies and pension funds did not provide information to the workers that they were entitled to benefits if they retired, were dismissed or retrenched.
The Financial Services Board said in a recent review in the mining industry it found there was R5.2bn in unclaimed benefits for the mineworkers.
This was for a total of 200 000 mineworkers.
The FSB said workers had to be cautious when claiming their benefits and not do so through intermediaries.
THE STAR