I am a local business owner in a small town. A typhoon recently hit the island where my business is and left massive flooding in our area. My home and parts of my business have been submerged in water for days, and I expect to spend a lot of money on repairs to get my business back in operation after the flood subsides.
My employees, all 20 of them, live in homes affected by the flood and they need help from the government to recover. The way that works here is through social security system calamity loans. The government provides a temporary loan to help people in a crisis and those people pay it back over time, usually via salary deductions.
That means employers, like me, have to do a lot of work processing applications and making repayments on behalf of employees, and making payments on behalf of the government. Instead of cleaning the mud out of my business, I’ve just spent three days doing nothing but processing personal loan applications for my staff. As much as I care for and value my employees, I don’t understand why this should be my job.
It’s tedious and time consuming to check that every application has the correct evidence and attachments and the right forms filled out the right way. Not only that, I also have to physically take all the forms and supporting documents to the local social security office (some 30 kms away) because I can’t afford to pay a messenger to do that for me.
It doesn’t end there. Once the calamity loans are approved, if they are approved, I have to go back to get the checks from the social security office and distribute them to my staff. I also have to collect a signed ‘received form’ from each staff member, and take all of those back to the social security office again.
This process is taking a huge amount of time right now, at the worst possible time, and will probably take at least two months to complete just the loan processing stage. Then I will have a couple of years of collecting repayments from staff and transferring them to the government, because I am not only their loan applications department, but also their accounts receivable department.
It just doesn’t seem fair. I’m a victim of the typhoon just as much as my employees, but still I’m expected to work for the government, for free, to provide emergency support. I think it would be better for everyone to just cut out the middleman so I can fix my own home and business.
