Technical problems blamed for stalled Yukon Senior Income Supplement payment

Key takeaways:

‘I feel neglected, and I feel upset and furious about it,’ says the recipient.
The Yukon Department of Health and Social Services stated technical problems with the Yukon government’s data management system are accused by delayed payments to low-income seniors.
It added seniors should get the payment anytime between Monday and next week.

Technical tribulations with the Yukon government’s information management system are being accused of delayed payments to low-income seniors.

Financial help from the Yukon Senior Income Supplement (YSIS) is generally deposited on the 15th of every month, but it didn’t happen last week.

“We’ve been working on substituting [the information management system] for a while, but it left over the last month. We did our maximum to sort of reboot it, get it going again, and it was not cooperating,” told Kaila deBoer, director of social supports at the Department of Health and Social Services.

deBoer stated on Monday that a new system is in place, so seniors should get payment anytime between Monday and next week.

She added that as shortly as the unit found out the funds weren’t being delivered, it tried to communicate that to people.

The government gave a press release late Friday afternoon saying it was “working to fix delays in YSIS payments” however no more details were available till Monday morning.

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Technical tribulations with the Yukon government’s information management system are being accused of delayed payments to low-income seniors

deBoer said the government was apologetic.

“We realize that for low-income people, having a hold is tragic,” she said.

Disturbing, annoying and degrading

That didn’t cause Linda Hilton to feel any better.

The long-time Whitehorse citizen is one of the thousands of seniors who did not get the YSIS payment last week.

She said when she reached the Yukon government to find out about the amount not coming through on Friday, she was told there were some uncertainties with the system, and the funds might not come at all this month.

Source – CBC News