The government officially announced that the new batch of the $ 10,000 bond provided by the Anses is beginning to assist the most unprotected sectors in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. It will be charged from June 8. As Clarín anticipated, this payment will reach 9 million beneficiaries and like the first batch it will have an amount of $ 10,000.
The announcement was made from the Government House at a press conference by Fernanda Raverta, the head of Anses. The official was accompanied by the Secretary for Economic Policy, Haroldo Montagu, and the national director of Economy and Gender, Mercedes D’Alessandro, both from the Ministry of Economy.
The latest economic news and the analysis of Daniel Fernández Canedo.
So far there are 8.3 million people enrolled in the Emergency Family Income (IFE). Of this total, there are almost a million beneficiaries who, with ten weeks of quarantine elapsed, have not yet received the first batch. According to the agenda established by Anses this Wednesday, the payment schedule for that first phase would end.
For this second payment there will be no new registrations. The beneficiaries will be the same ones that charged the first batch. Raverta explained that “the beneficiaries do not have to register anywhere. The one who already collected it will collect it again: the idea is to reinforce based on the spread of this pandemic. ”
Three weeks ago Raverta had anticipated that the second payment would kick off once the first phase was complete. Now it has been confirmed that the second round will start next Monday, June 8 and will last “between four and five weeks,” Raverta said. If this deadline is met, it will mean a reduction in half with respect to the schedule for the first phase, which started on April 3. That was the day that a million retirees and AUH beneficiaries gathered to collect their salaries after the banks had been closed for 10 days.
At the conference Raverta said that what Anses is looking for is “to simplify the schedule and to be verbose, not to crowd people on the street. We want it to be gradual and orderly.”
When launching the IFE Anses, he encountered two problems. The first was that the number of beneficiaries was much higher than the universe they had estimated. From a forecast of 3.6 million people, they jumped to 9 million. The second was that half of these people did not have a bank account, so the agency had to put together a system so that they could still collect. Of that total, there are 1.3 million that are still charging at the branches of the Argentine Post.
The Anses has 8.3 million people registered in this program. But there are also another 400,000 potential beneficiaries who still do not have an assigned payment location. And another 400,000 who were rejected due to errors during the registration process and whose cases are being reviewed.
To streamline payments, Anses arranged for more banks to become payment agents. Through a resolution of the Central Bank, entities are obliged to accept as clients those beneficiaries that Anses sends them. Thus, they hope that with more branches the collection of the second batch will speed up. In this sense, the official said that the intention is “to reach 9 million Argentines not only with the benefit but also with a bank account.”
When asked if a third round of the bond could be implemented, Raverta responded that the government “is analyzing the responses required at each stage of the pandemic. For now we are committed to this second step.”
