Unclaimed workers' benefit money fuels $44M growth in N.B. budget surplus
CBC
Most people the New Brunswick government targeted to receive a new $300 workers' benefit have not applied for the money, and $44 million the province set aside in last year's budget to finance payments to the end of March went unclaimed, new figures show.
That will add $44 million to last year's budget surplus, an issue New Brunswick Opposition Leader Susan Holt says the province needs to address quickly.
"The point was to help people who are struggling with the cost of living," Holt said.
"I definitely don't think we should use this to inflate the surplus."
The workers' benefit was announced by Premier Blaine Higgs in a speech in Fredericton on Jan. 25.
He said it would help "low-income working families" with the cost of living and $75 million was being set aside to fund payments to an estimated 250,000 eligible recipients.
Speaking later to reporters, the premier said he hoped most, if not all of the money would be in people's hands by March 31.
"We will try if we can," he said on Feb. 15.
"They'll start, I would say, probably by the end of February and we'll get a good portion of them at the end of this quarter."
Eventually, the Department of Finance budgeted $58.8 million to process 196,000 applications by March 31, with the remaining 54,000 benefit payments to be processed in the current fiscal year, which began on April 1.
But those projections proved fanciful.
By March 31, just 49,460 applications had arrived at the Department of Finance, 146,000 fewer than it expected by that date and 200,000 short of the program's ultimate goal.
That left $44 million of the $58.8 million budgeted for the benefit program in the last fiscal year unclaimed, an amount that reverts to the province.
That will further inflate what was already estimated to be a $247.4-million budget surplus.
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