Saturday, December 10, 2011

MOF: Hotline or Scam-line?

9/12/2011
Under the 2012 budget, the Federal Government had promised a one-off allocation of RM500 for households earning an income of under RM3000. This is intended to relieve the burden of inflation for these families.
On Thursday 8th December, the mainstream press published a hotline number for the public to call in order to see if they are eligible for the relief and how they can obtain it. However, Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng had received several complaints from the members of the public who called the hotline but were unable to get through to the operator.
“They complained to me that when they tried calling, they were told that all the operators were busy. However, after waiting for long periods of time they still could not get through,” he said.
Lim has called the hotline personally and has instructed both of his assistants to call the hotline sixteen times at half hour intervals between 9am and 12pm today, but with no success.
Clearly frustrated, Lim was angry that the public would be so inconvenienced as a result of the non-responsive hotline. “If the Ministry of Finance was really genuine about helping the people, why did they set up a useless hotline?”
Lim called on the Federal government to stop misleading the people, and he hopes that this issue can be resolved quickly.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is sad to hear Malaysians with low income begging for government's help when there should be much more established welfare channels long ago.
It is even sadder to know that hard earned tax payers' money being spent by this seemingly short sighted approach. The government should have long term policy "to teach a man to fish (job creation, better education system etc. etc.) and not simply pass on a fish (RM500)"