Government failed to pay lay-off subsidies on time

Portugal’s economy minister, Pedro Siza Vieira, said that the government had failed to meet expectations by not ensuring payment of lay-off subsidies by April 28, estimating that everything will be processed by May 5.

The minister said an additional effort will be made to see if payment for layoff requests made after April 10 takes place in the first half of May.

“Our goal was that all payments would be made before the end of the month so that businessmen would have cash on hand before they had to make salary payments. I know this will cause stress and some delays in processing salaries, but we had 95,000 lay-off requests to be processed which overloaded the machine,” he said.

Siza Vieira said, based on information from Social Security, lay-off requests will be paid by May 5, corresponding to about 32,000 companies.

On Tuesday, in a press conference, the minister of labour, solidarity and social security, Ana Mendes Godinho, said that around 600,000 people and 70,000 companies will receive support in the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic until May 5, a total of 216 million euros.

On the same day, her office clarified that Social Security had approved 61.7% of the 62,341 applications to join the simplified lay-off that was requested by companies by the beginning of April.

According to the ministry, 15.1% of the applications (9,458) were rejected for various reasons, among them because the companies did not have their tax status updated or did not have the accountant’s certification or because they did not comply with the rules for the start date of support.

Also, 3.1% of the applications (1,946) were rejected because they were incorrectly filled in or because the IBAN was not indicated.