Vostok-SOS (East-SOS) and the Right to Protection charitable foundation doubt that Oschadbank is ready to make social payments to internally displaced persons (IDPs) as foreseen in cabinet resolution No. 427 of June 15 and cabinet resolution No. 615 of August 12.

"The separate question is how Oschadbank is ready to accept applications from internally displaced persons. Vostok-SOS organization also did not manage to receive agreements on the exchange of information between Oschadbank, the Finance Ministry and the Social Policy Ministry. Oschadbank has not yet responded to the request, while the Social Policy Ministry referred to it confidentiality, while the Finance Ministry said that the document is being discussed. However, Oschadbank is accepting documents from [internally] displaced persons," coordinator of Vostok-SOS civil volunteer initiative Oleksandra Dvoretska said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Wednesday.

Lawyer of the All-Ukrainian Charitable Foundation the Right to Protection Olena Vynohradova said that the charitable foundation studied the readiness of Oschadbank to execute new liabilities at 210 departments located in 13 regions of Ukraine.

"The study showed that only 42 departments out of 210 have a separate window for getting aid, lines appeared in 132 departments, which is evidence of the high additional burden. 90% of them did not have information on the stands regarding the procedures, and more than half of them did not accept the documents from [internally] displaced persons due to various reasons, people were sent to the contact center of Oschadbank or to the social protection department or other departments," she said.

Vynohradova said that over 60% of IDPs are pensioners who find it difficult to download an application from a website or use the services of the contact center which does not always work correctly.

Representative of the parliamentary envoy for human rights, Mykhailo Chaplyha, said that cabinet resolution No. 505 of October 1, 2014, which defines the procedure for paying monetary aid to IDPs, should be revised to protect their personal information.

"In particular, the question of how information on [internally] displaced persons will be transferred between the Pension Fund and Oschadbank, and on what grounds. We held a joint meeting with representatives of the Finance Ministry, Pension Fund and Oschadbank, and agreed that the resolutions should be revised," he said.

Chaplyha said that personal cases would not be automatically transferred from the Pension Fund to Oschadbank without the applications of IDPs

He said that the oral agreement that pension accounts that have already been opened would not be automatically closed and no one would force IDPs to transfer to another account.

Deputy Director of the finance, healthcare and social programs department of the Finance Ministry Andriy Riazantsev expressed his readiness to cooperate with the purpose of improving the mechanism for servicing displaced persons and protecting their rights.

He also said that after the introduction of the procedure under cabinet resolution No. 505 the Finance Ministry has monitored the number of opened accounts every day. He said that at present their number is around 64,000, and at the moment of the recent benchmarking study (around one and a half months ago) it was 48,800.

"The number of persons who received certificates and started getting aid for [internally] displaced persons over the period was 101,000. This is evidence of existence of postponed demand on the opening of accounts or the inability of opening the accounts due to some reasons," Riazantsev said.

He said that the budget has earmarked UAH 3.4 billion in aid to IDPs this year.

"If we speak about pensions, since November 2014 around UAH 21 billion of pensions have been paid to internally displaced pensioners," he said.

He said that the Finance Ministry is working on a draft resolution which would increase payments to IDPs which is also linked to the heating season.