-GM tells Parliament committee
The National Insurance Scheme (NIS) has taken measures to deal with employers who submit contributions with just last names and no NIS numbers, according to Acting General Manager Doreen Nelson, who said that for years this has been a sore point which has contributed to employees’ contribution records not being correct.
Nelson was at the time responding to queries by PPP/C parliamentarian Dharamkumar Seeraj regarding incorrect contribution records which have been the major complaint by sugar workers across the country.
“Several of the schedules, particularly in the early years, came in with just part of names and no NIS number [and] that is the unique thing we use to identify persons, NIS numbers . . . ,” Nelson told the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services last Friday during a hearing.
Nelson, along with NIS Board Chairman, Dr Roger Luncheon and several other senior employees of the scheme, appeared before the committee which is chaired by Gail Teixeira and members Seeraj, Fazil Khan and Rev Kwame Gilbert, all PPP/C parliamentarians, and the lone PNCR parliamentarian Dave Danny.
“It’s lots of the old records, but we have put lots of things in place to ensure that is not happening still because at one time we had said we would not be taking in your schedule if it was not with all the numbers…” Nelson said.
However, that created its own problem as the scheme soon found out that those persons who were turned away instead of returning to their place of employment for the correct numbers just wrote numbers off the top of their heads and returned the schedules to the scheme.
“So you know all these things compounded the kind of problems we have in the system,” adding that once the correct numbers are on the schedules then there would be no problem.
Meanwhile, on another issue following a query from Teixeira who wanted to know the ratio of female contributors and whether the scheme’s maternity department has enough funds to pay such benefits, Assistant General Manager, Operation, Terry Thomas said that there is an equal number of women and men paying contributions and he said the expenditure of the maternity branch is well within its funding.
For last year some $172M was paid out in maternity benefits compared to $162.9M in 2008.
Following the end of the hearing, Teixeira revealed that her committee will prepare a report which would be tabled in parliament that would deal with not only NIS but also the other agencies they would have met during the years.