{"id":970,"date":"2026-05-08T04:09:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T04:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/?p=970"},"modified":"2026-05-08T04:09:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T04:09:09","slug":"aswesuma-double-payment-issue-explained-by-welfare-benefits-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/2026\/05\/08\/aswesuma-double-payment-issue-explained-by-welfare-benefits-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Aswesuma Double Payment Issue Explained by Welfare Benefits Board"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Welfare Benefits Board has issued a clarification regarding reports claiming that April payments under the Aswesuma welfare scheme were made twice.<\/p>\n<p>According to the Board, the intention was to provide April payments to Aswesuma beneficiaries before the Sinhala and Tamil New Year.<\/p>\n<p>Accordingly, payments for first and second phase beneficiaries were issued on April 10, 2026.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the regular allowance, the government had also decided to provide special New Year relief payments to families affected by the conflict situation in the Middle East.<\/p>\n<p>The special payments were as follows:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>7,500 rupees for extremely poor families<\/li>\n<li>5,000 rupees for poor families<\/li>\n<li>2,500 rupees for vulnerable families<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Since the Integrated Welfare Benefits Information System does not support making payments twice within the same month, the Board decided to distribute the special New Year relief payment manually using external slip files.<\/p>\n<p>During the process, documents relating to around 1.7 million families were prepared and sent to the Bank of Ceylon in batches containing 90,000 slip files each.<\/p>\n<p>However, due to an error at the bank, one slip file was uploaded twice.<\/p>\n<p>As a result, some beneficiaries in the \u201cpoor families\u201d category received double payments.<\/p>\n<p>The Welfare Benefits Board stated that it immediately took action to suspend the duplicate payments and instructed banks to return the excess amounts to the Board\u2019s bank account.<\/p>\n<p>Despite the suspension order, 49,759 beneficiaries had already withdrawn the additional money from their accounts.<\/p>\n<p>The total excess amount withdrawn was reported to be 248,795,000 rupees, and authorities plan to recover the money from the beneficiaries\u2019 May Aswesuma payments.<\/p>\n<p>The Board emphasized that the incident did not result in any financial loss or fraud to the government.<\/p>\n<p>It further explained that the issue occurred due to the urgent decision to make payments outside the computerized system and noted that steps are being taken swiftly to recover the extra payments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Welfare Benefits Board has issued a clarification regarding reports claiming that April payments under the Aswesuma welfare scheme were made twice. According to the Board, the intention was to provide April payments to Aswesuma beneficiaries before the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. Accordingly, payments for first and second phase beneficiaries were issued on April &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":971,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=970"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":972,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions\/972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tamilmail.lk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}