This newspaper has published several articles on the delinquency of employers in the matter of remitting employee National Insurance Scheme (NIS) contributions. The issue is deserving of continuous media attention for a number of reasons. First, up until now the delinquent employers have been getting away with the practice to the extent that hundreds of millions of dollars of employee NIS contributions remain unpaid. Worse, NIS officials say that the available evidence suggests that some of the worst offenders appear to have no intention of paying up the outstanding amounts, voluntarily that is.
Secondly, the practice amounts to flagrant abuse of several thousands of workers – whose salaries, in many cases, are hardly enough to meet their basic needs – by employers, who, it is reasonable to assume, are decidedly better off. Thirdly, the practice has persisted in the face of ceaseless protestations by the victims and neither the NIS, government or the lobour movement have been able to put an end to the problem. In fact, given the considerable leverage at the disposal of government in this matter it is probably fair to say that it has not done nearly enough over the years to bring the offenders to heel.
Fourthly, the list of delinquent employers includes a number of supposedly reputable business houses and prominent citizens, people whom one would assume ought to be setting some kind of example in terms of complying with the laws of the land.
National Insurance benefits are, for thousands of wage earners, the sole safety net – given their inability to accumulate any alternative savings – in the event of illnesses, accidents or work site injuries. The fact that there are employers who are content to be concerned about furthering their own interests at the expense of the very workers whose efforts are directly linked to their fortunes is, quite simply, a moral outrage.
Hopefully, the worm is beginning to turn. The NIS disclosed recently that it intends to institute criminal proceedings against the worst offenders, that is, those who owe the Scheme tens of millions of dollars in employee contributions and have, over a lengthy period, demonstrated a studied disinclination to settle those debts. Equally welcome is news that under its current reform programme the Scheme will be seeking to lobby government to disqualify transgressors from securing the NIS certificates of compliance that are a requirement in submitting tenders for state contracts.
Up until relatively recently delinquent employers were still able to find their way around the compliance problem and the Scheme itself must accept responsibility for a regime that is perhaps best described as one of “ill-advised flexibility.” We have also learnt of several cases in which, in the absence of valid compliances, forgeries have been used in support of tenders for state contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The whole affair amounts to the cocktail of corruption that lays bare the seamier side of our society, mocks the principles of fairness and transparency and plays “monopoly” with the lives of the poor and the powerless.
The NIS has argued that the courts have not served the system well. Over time it has become “tied up” in protracted litigation and in many cases, at the end of the process, some of the companies against which they secure judgment simply disappear “like butter ‘gainst the sun” since they find themselves unable to discharge the mountain of their financial liabilities to the NIS. The Scheme has argued that the experience of companies evaporating into liquidation without paying their debts has resulted in a selective approach of “going easy” on some transgressors by continuing to grant them compliances in the hope that by keeping them afloat outstanding amounts will eventually be paid. The problem with this approach is that in many instances the flexibility of the NIS has been abused by employers who, it would seem, simply have no intention of settling their debts.
The current posture of the NIS suggests that it has learnt from its trusting ways. The Scheme is now making it clear that it is no longer prepared to “play ball” with the transgressors. Under its reform programme the NIS will also be seeking access to the income tax records of employers in order to secure insights into their income and the number of workers that they employ since false declarations regarding numbers of employees is also a ruse designed to reduce the volume of contributions remitted to the NIS.
In much the same way that the business sector unceasingly lobbies government for concessions of one sort or another designed to render their businesses more profitable, so too they must spare a thought for the welfare of their employees and their employees’ families. To seek to cheat workers out of benefits that are rightfully their’s (while seeking to secure every possible advantage for the delinquent organization) is, indeed, a criminal act. The government, at its highest levels – Cabinet Secretary Dr. Roger Luncheon is the Chairman of the Board of the NIS – can do much to ease the hardships of the workers of the country by simply throwing its weight behind the efforts of the Scheme to bring greater pressure to bear on employers to “do right” by the people who work for them.
