Opposition party the Democratic Alliance (DA) on Thursday called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to extend the deadline for applications for the Unemployment Insurance Fund’s (UIF’s) coronavirus (Covid-19) Temporary Employee/Employer Relief Scheme (TERS) benefit, urging the South African Revenue Service (Sars) to scale up its assistance to the fund.

The deadline for application is April 30, however the DA said it should be extended to May 15.

DA Shadow Minister for Employment and Labour Dr Michael Cardo said Sars needed to massively scale up its assistance to the UIF to streamline the processing and payment of the TERS benefit.

“Sars should merge the data at its disposal (principally IRP5 reconciliations and EMP 201 declarations) with UIF applications so that pay-outs can occur more rapidly and accurately,” he said.

The fund was established on March 25 to provide relief to those in formal employment who expected to lose their income owing to the Covid-19 lockdown.

Cardo says the extension is necessary as the applications process had been plagued with “gremlins and obstacles”, which made it almost impossible for a large number of employers to submit their applications on time.

The Department of Employment and Labour said the UIF had received more than 103 000 applications from employers representing about 1.75-million employees.

The UIF has more than 1.8-million employers registered on its database representing more than 8-million workers.

“Many employers have not been able to access the Covid-19 TERS website because the site has repeatedly crashed over the past two weeks. Initially, the UIF created an email portal to which employers emailed all the required documentation: bank statements, their payroll and a signed MOA. This system was subsequently abandoned in favour of a new website. The website has persistently malfunctioned. Furthermore, many employers don’t know whether their applications were successfully migrated to the new site or whether they need to resubmit them,” explained Cardo.

He said many employers were locked out of their UIF uFiling profiles, saying the UIF and employers needed more time for applications.