The Fiji National Provident Fund says the processing of flood assistance applications will be completed by the end of this month.

Fund’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Aisake Taito, said that due to the high volume of applications received by the Fund, processing time will take longer than the 10-days initially estimated.

The Fund received over 57,000 applications for this assistance. To date over 35,000 applications have been processed with over 28,000 paid out totaling over $26million. Six thousand applications have been rejected; with another 9,000 in queried status.

“We ask our members to remain patient with us as we try to sieve through all pending applications.”

He added that delay to processing can also attributed to:

• A large number of applications were received from members who were not affected by the flood; and filtering them has been a challenge.
• Member applications for other grounds were also processed; and this scheme coincided with the peak period for education, unemployment and low wage earners.

“Nevertheless, the Fund is committed to making decisions on all outstanding cases within the next couple of weeks.”

Mr Taito said all applications for flood assistance are now being processed in Suva.

This week the Fund opened a flood query centre manned by three staff at the Downtown Boulevard.

The Fund opened the flood assistance on January 20th and closed on the 5th of February in response to the recent floods that affected the Central, Western and Northern Divisions.

For more information, please contact:
Wainikiti Bogidrau
Manager Public Relations & Corporate Communications
323 8459 or 999 8104 or on email: WainikitiB@fnpf.com.fj