Under suspicion that up to 80 per cent of the people to access government's TTCards in the five years did so fraudulently, Social Development Minister Cherrie-Ann Crichlow-Cockburn yesterday promised an audit into the programme.
Crichlow-Cockburn, in her contribution to the Budget debate in the Lower House, said the programme is to be revamped to fulfill its original intention of providing relief to persons in need.
Popularly called the “food card”, the former People's Partnership government had announced its intention to assimilate the TTCard into a biometric Smart Card programme that would help the elimination of fraud.
Read more: TT: ‘Food card’ system to be revamped, says minister
Cabinet has already approved an electronic system to follow the Biometric Smart Card which will monitor recipients of all social grants, case by case.
If Minister of the People and Social Development Christine Newallo-Hosein gets a second term in government, this system will be put in place soon after.
Newallo-Hosein made the statement on Thursday when asked to elaborate on the decommissioning of 4,000 people from the food card (Targeted Conditional Cash Transfer Programme) programme because of fraudulent activities.
Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Rupert Griffith and Moruga/Tabeland MP who is also Minister of Gender, Youth and Child Development, Clifton De Coteau officially opened the fourth Star.TT Access Centre located at the Marac Community Centre.
By 2016, one per cent of the world’s population will own more than half of its wealth. The staggering projection, from a recent study by anti-poverty group Oxfam, made headlines just as the World Economic Forum (WEF) was getting started in Davos last month.
One concern for secretary general of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) Professor Tim Unwin, who was at the WEF, is that the rapid spread of information and communications technologies is not helping to reduce that growing gap between poor and rich.
“Senior citizens are an invaluable, vibrant growing demographic within our nation. However, most educational systems are focused on younger people and limited progress has been made in adopting educational systems to the needs of senior learners, who have enormous potential,” said Dr Rupert Griffith, Minister of Science and Technology.