Media Statement By Violet Yong:
Malaysia is already 3 months into endemic phase since 1st April, 2022, the promised one off financial assistance of BKSS7.0 for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and BKSS7.0 (+) for Micro Businesses respectively announced by the Sarawak Government in August, 2021 which are supposed to assist the business sectors to tide over difficult time during Covid-19 Pandemic have not completed processing and disbursed to all qualified applicants.
Given that many eligible companies which had applied for the financial aid before are clueless as to their status of applications, State Assemblyman YB Chong Chieng Jen and I had a meeting with the Director of Sarawak Economic Planning Unit (EPU) Datu Dr Muhammad Abdullah Zaidel and his team yesterday afternoon to follow up on the issue.
I handed over the list of companies that had sought assistance from me but had not yet received the promised aid till now.
During the meeting, EPU revealed that there are about 7000 applications which have yet to be verified and the unit is working hard to finalize.
When we asked about the time schedule to complete verifying and disbursing the financial aid, EPU officer responsible for this BKSS7.0/(+) did not give a definite answer to it but stressed that they will do their best to process it as soon as possible as the verification process is a tedious task.
Many applicants expressed great disappointment with the state government in taking more than eight months to handle and process BKSS7.0/(+) applications. In addition, the problem of not having a special service line to able the public to call and check on the status of applications for BKSS 7.0/(+) also gives rise to people’s frustration over the issue.
In the meeting, apart from urging for another chance to be given to applicants to rectify the error of information submitted before or missed the re-submission deadline earlier this year, I called on EPU to step up effort by increasing manpower to speed up the whole process in order to ensure this BKSS 7.0/(+)issue could come to a completeness rather than keep dragging on.
Violet Yong
ADUN for Pending
17.6.2022
