Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) President Chandradat Chintamani has issued a call to members of the business community who have been seriously delinquent in remitting employee contributions to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) to discharge their obligation to the NIS and to contributors, many of whom may have no other source from which to finance the costs of their medical needs.
Noting that the huge amounts in outstanding employee contributions coincided with a period of serious economic crisis and concern over possible job losses Chintamani said that employers had a duty to settle those liabilities “in good faith” and to do so quickly.
The call for delinquent private sector employers to pay up worker contributions comes against the backdrop of frustration being expressed by officials of the Scheme over several cases in which millions of dollars in contributions remain outstanding despite resort to the courts. This newspaper has been reliably informed that outstanding NIS contributions total approximately $600 million and that the vast majority of this amount is owed by private sector employers.
While insisting that the settlement of the outstanding liabilities to the NIS was a “matter of businesses being socially responsible,” Chintamani criticized the Scheme for seemingly not having mechanisms in place to ensure that payments of worker contributions do not go adrift to the extent of hundreds of millions of dollars. “The problem is two-fold. The employer has an obligation to make the contributions to the National Insurance Scheme, both in terms of what they deduct from employees’ salaries and their own contributions. On the other hand the NIS should not allow a single month to pass. A system should be in place that ensures that once a month goes by a red flag is raised. Once that is in place you will not have many months going by and many companies owing such substantial amounts. We cannot allow contributions to a workers’ scheme to go adrift by $600 million,” Chintamani said.
The GCCI President said that he is aware that some private sector organizations feel “short-changed” by the NIS because it sometimes takes a long time to receive benefits from the Scheme. He said that he believed that some employers might be using different pretexts to withhold NIS payments adding that there could be no justification for the attendant difficulties that were being created for workers. “I believe that this is an appropriate time for me to call on our members who are adrift in their contributions to the NIS to fulfill that obligation without delay. If the NIS has limitations in other areas that is something that we must address separately.”
Asked to comment on the call by the Chamber President for private sector employers to remit worker contributions a well-placed NIS source said that while “coming from a senior private sector official it was a good sign, one has to hope that the call would secure a better result than the frustration of the courts.” The source suggested that the delinquency on the part of private sector employers resulted from their awareness that the NIS was playing with “a weak hand” since neither the courts nor the government appeared inclined to help put pressure on them to pay up.
Some weeks ago this newspaper published an editorial on the NIS issue in which it suggested that the delinquent businessmen may well be moved if President Bharrat Jagdeo were to publicly pronounce on the issue.
