According to President Renate Anderl, parents of newborns and parents of children who have just turned 18 are affected, where it must be checked whether the entitlement is still given due to studies or training. Anderl calls for more staff for the responsible bodies in the Ministry of Finance and better insurance protection for single parents.
The Ministry of Finance is responsible for paying out the family allowance. After the criticism of the Ombudsman’s Office at the weekend, this had already defended itself by suspending the entitlement tests during the Corona crisis. With the resumption now it is necessary to process 207,000 responses. Around 92 percent have already been done, it said in a statement.
According to this illustration, around 17,000 families are affected by the current delays. The Chamber of Labor sees – like the Ombudsman Board – the reason for the problem in the centralization of the tax offices initiated in 2020. The ministry’s hotline is completely overloaded. “Many parents complain to us that they cannot get through to the finance ministry’s hotline or that they are passed on to places that cannot provide any information,” noted Anderl in a broadcast.
Actually, the restructuring should have brought more efficiency. But now you can see exactly the opposite, said the Upper Austrian AK President Johann Kalliauer in the Ö1 “Mittagsjournal” – and called for this turquoise-blue reform to be withdrawn.
In any case, Anderl noted that the ministry would have to react quickly. Without family allowance, the situation of parents of newborn children could “very quickly become precarious” – after all, receiving family allowances is also a prerequisite for childcare allowance. And the latter, in turn, the prerequisite for social insurance for mothers or fathers, where co-insurance with the partner is not possible, i.e. mainly single parents, but also, for example, parents with whom a partner works abroad and is insured.
