Finance Secretary David DLG Atalig said they are working with the government\u2019s main bank, Bank of Guam, to revert back to direct deposits in releasing Pandemic Unemployment Assistance money as the process is quicker. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of checking and verification when we do paper checks,\u201d said Atalig during Friday\u2019s radio news briefing. <\/p>\n
Atalig was set to have a meeting with Bank of Guam officials last Monday morning to resolve issues in reverting back to direct deposits so they can ensure that recipients will get their PUA funds quickly. <\/p>\n
As of press time yesterday, Saipan Tribune was awaiting Atalig\u2019s update about his meeting with the bank. <\/p>\n
Atalig said that batches of PUA checks that they have already printed are now at the Department of Labor and are being reviewed. <\/p>\n
He said his team at Finance is also working with Labor as well to speed up the process. \u201cWe are working out these details,\u201d he said, referring to his talks with the bank in reverting to direct deposits. <\/p>\n
He said if there was any issues that were corrected, and then wasn\u2019t corrected in the Geo Solutions system, those people were converted to paper checks. <\/p>\n
The secretary explained that the reason why they transferred or moved people from direct deposits to paper check is that they are guided by the rules of the National Treasury and banking laws that once there are three errors on any ACH (Automated Clearing House) wire transfer to any account, they will suspend their ability to transfer. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo we\u2019ve been working with the Bank of Guam, trying to correct these issues so that we don\u2019t get suspended,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Atalig said suspension just for the PUA suspended the government\u2019s ability to wire transfer transact through ACH. \u201cSo to minimize that suspension and those issues, these are the reasons why we were converting people to paper checks to ensure that unless the [Labor\u2019s software vendor] Geo Solutions correct the proper accounts and proper coding, then we can revert them back to direct deposits,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Atalig said he couldn\u2019t take the risk of freezing up his ability to do ACH transfers for other vendor payments and non-PUA related matters, including the government payroll, so he had to take those measures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finance Secretary David DLG Atalig said they are working with the government\u2019s main bank, Bank…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":332493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}