After receiving a number of complaints about benefit payments, Director of the National Insurance Board (NIB) Rowena Bethel said yesterday the board of NIB is committed to resolving technical and organizational failures from the $14 million smart card IT platform launched in March by mid-June.

Those failures resulted in persons not receiving disablement benefit claims and short-term benefit claims such as maternity, sickness, injury and unemployment from March. It appears there is a backlog of information from NIB's old IT platform that makes it difficult for payments to be made from the new system on a timely basis.

Speaking with Guardian Business, Bethel said she is asking for the public to bear with NIB until mid-June in order to make respective payments.

"As is common in projects of this magnitude, transition issues have been encountered with the final roll-out of phase two, resulting in regrettable inconvenience to a number of our valued customers," said Bethel.

The rollout of the new smart card has three phases. The project is in phase two, and the final phase will be executed thereafter.

During a previous press conference, Dr. Raymond Wells, senior deputy director at NIB responsible for IT, pointed out that the rollout of the new system would proceed in two phases.

The first phase -- that is, the part of the system that went live on March 30, 2016 -- is focused on employees accessing the system, and the second phase of the rollout that will allow employers to use the system fully is expected to launch in June 2016.

The completion of phase two, which is the most complex of the phases, was scheduled for the first week in April. However, Bethel explained that a combination of difficulties delayed the launch of phase two.

The director said NIB encountered issues that were not contemplated, in addition to staff learning to be comfortable with the transition to the new platform.

"People are familiar in a certain mode and when you have to change over that is a process," said Bethel.

But, the director insisted that she does not "anticipate any more problems" with the system after mid-June.

The director said the backlog is being reduced every day. She estimated the number of backlogs to be 400 to 500 two days ago.

"The public can be assured that we are working hard to resolve these issues along with our technology partner," said Bethel. "We anticipate that our services will be fully back on stream by mid-June 2016," she said.

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