At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, this newspaper is returning once again to the delinquency of employers in the private sector insofar as the payment of their employees’ National Insurance Scheme (NIS) contributions is concerned.
We do so, first, because of manifest and continually unfolding evidence that employer delinquency frequently results in unacceptable hardship for ordinary people and, secondly, because we believe that more can be done to tackle this problem.
The problem has to do with employers who simply refuse to pay either their own contributions to their employees’ NIS savings or that which they deduct from their employees’ wages as personal contributions to the Scheme. Then there are employers who arbitrarily designate employees as self-employed, in which case they contend that they have no responsibility to make any payments to the Scheme on behalf of persons who are, in fact, legitimately in their employ.
When last we checked, the extent of the outstanding contributions for private sector employees had reportedly risen above six hundred million dollars, a staggering liability by any stretch of the imagination; and some of the particularly delinquent employers were adrift in their payments by tens of millions of dollars
There is, moreover, no question of the unavailability of evidence of this outrageous delinquency. The evidence is readily available through resort to the records of the Scheme. Moreover, the records indicate that the delinquents include many prominent businesses, including banks, security services and large wholesale and retail outlets and a number of well-known individuals. The consequences of their delinquency invariably accrue to those in our society who are least able to forego their NIS benefits.
We have felt too that there is a role for government in addressing this situation and that the authorities have been more than a little leaden-footed in pursuit of their responsibility in this matter. True, we ought not to find ourselves in a situation where employers have to be pressured into discharging their legal responsibilities; the fact is, however, that the situation is as it is, and it is criminal that honest, hard-working and mostly poor people should be allowed to suffer in this manner.
In cases where employees are deprived of their NIS benefits on account of employer delinquency the government has a duty to do everything in its power to right that wrong and to do so as expeditiously as possible. Up until now resort to the courts on the part of the Scheme – which, of course, ought to be the first option once persistent appeals to delinquent employers bear no fruit – has manifestly not worked. The legal process is protracted, so protracted in many cases, that the delinquent employers are often able to file for bankruptcy or to otherwise get out of business before judgment can be passed against them in the courts. Of course, the failure of the legal system to deal with many of the delinquents is really no good excuse to have the suffering of NIS contributors to continue ad infinitum.
To add insult to injury there are the cases of those cynical employers (to whom we referred in our editorial of April 30) who through corrupt conspiracies, are able to secure forged Certificates of Compliance to allow them to bid for state contracts despite the fact that they are not, in fact, compliant, as far as the paying up of their employees’ NIS is concerned.
The whole affair has profound moral underpinnings since at the heart of all this is an insidious scheme by the ‘haves’ to further deny and frustrate the ‘have nots’ and in all this the authorities have been negligent in righting these cruel and unacceptable wrongs.
It surely has to amount to frustration in the extreme to find – as workers frequently do – that what in many cases is the only available resort fails you in times of the most desperate need for reasons that have to do with cynical betrayal by employers.
Just how much of a difference the recently signed Memorandum of Cooperation between the Ministry of Labour and the NIS will make is probably debatable. This is so for two reasons. First, while the MOC seeks essentially to increase the strength of the inspectorate team charged with examining employer records to determine delinquency, the combined strength of the team from the two agencies is still woefully inadequate to do the job properly. The second consideration has to do with the fact that the real problem has less to do with detecting the offenders and more to do with getting them to settle their debts to the NIS. Indeed, the Scheme readily admits that it knows exactly who some of the bigger offenders are. The real problem is getting judgment in the courts after numerous appeals to them to pay up have failed to bear any fruit.
Simply put, even if one assumes that the new Ministry of Labour/NIS MOC succeeds in netting more delinquent employees, unless that higher level of detection is accompanied by a mechanism that hastens settlement of their liabilities to the NIS, the result, will be, at best, an even greater number of cases in the courts.
There is more that the government can do. It could, for example do a lot of good if the President himself were to make clear his personal concern over this particular transgression of the law. Our guess is that his publicly stated intolerance of this practice is more than likely to see a fair number of the delinquents ‘hot footing’ it to the NIS headquarters with cheques for the ‘back monies’ owing to the Scheme. That would certainly please the thousands of ordinary workers across the country who constantly worry about their NIS headaches.
