The Finance Ministry has formally admitted that thousands of Aswesuma welfare recipients received double payments for April because a payment file was uploaded twice during processing.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the Welfare Benefits Board said a “slip file” was duplicated while processing additional festive allowances approved ahead of the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. About 1.7 million beneficiary families were included in the payment process, with files grouped into batches of 90,000 before being sent to the Bank of Ceylon for distribution.
The duplication resulted in double payments to some beneficiaries in the “poor” category. The Ministry said immediate action was taken to suspend further duplicate payments and instruct banks to reverse the funds to the Welfare Benefits Board’s accounts. However, 49,759 beneficiaries had already withdrawn the additional payments before the transactions were halted.
The government said about Rs. 248.7 million will be recovered from May’s Aswesuma installments. The Board’s Chairman, Nimal Kotawelagedara, defended the process, saying officials had been working under severe time pressure after the government announced increased festive allowances shortly before the April payments were due. He said the additional allowances had to be processed outside the normal digital system, leading to one payment list being uploaded twice.
The admission follows a Free Lawyers Organization complaint to the Speaker earlier this week, which alleged nearly Rs. 500 million may have been irregularly paid and called for a parliamentary investigation. The watchdog compared the episode to the USD 2.5 million Treasury cyber theft, warning that both cases pointed to weaknesses in state financial controls.
The April installment was credited to 689,931 beneficiaries under the recently overhauled digital framework. Thursday’s statement is the first time the government has put a number on the irregular payments and acknowledged the cause as a procedural slip rather than fraud or system intrusion.
