It would appear that Guyana is by no means the only the only Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member country where persons employed in the private sector have the shock of their lives at particularly vulnerable moments upon discovering that huge chunks of National Insurance Scheme (NIS) deductions have ‘gone south’ insofar as amounts deducted from their salaries as contributions towards their pension schemes, are not paid in by their employers but have, instead, ended up, presumably, in the pockets of delinquent business owners who failed to properly route those deductions. The tragedy here is that, in many instances, by the time the anomalies are discovered and brought to the attention of the competent authorities the delinquent business establishments have been, in many instances, already tightly ‘wound up’ the owners having ‘moved on’ to some other entrepreneurial venture, migrated or, in some instances, gone to the ‘great beyond.’ In such instances, the victim has little choice but to lick his/her wounds and move on as best they can.
It is not uncommon for some business ‘models’ in the Caribbean to take pretty much the same ‘shape’. Indeed, there might even be instances in which there is a shared appetite for unpalatable ‘business practices’. It transpires that one of the disclosures made by the twin-island Republic’s Finance Minister, Colm Imbert, was that government will be pressing ahead with its plan to increase the country’s retirement age from the current 60 years to 65. Other things will change too. As a T&T media report earlier this week states, “Once the proposal takes effect, employees will have the option to work for five more years before they tap into the National Insurance Retirement Benefit”. Nothing wrong there, it seems, except that the President of the Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers’ Association (TTMA) Roger Roach has ‘jumped in’ with what, apparently, was a robust recommendation that while the T&T government is ‘at it, re-jigging’ of the NIS contributions and payments arrangements, it “also turn its attention to businesses that are failing to pay NIS for staff,” a-la-Guyana.
For the records, when we raised the matter of delinquent employers with an NIS source earlier this week we were told that the practice persists, even if it may have reduced somewhat. Apparently, efforts to ‘seal the cracks’ insofar as delinquent business owners are concerned here in Guyana still leaves some holes to be puttied over. Another bother in T&T, it seems, is that the NIS ‘pot’ has diminished considerably on account of the ‘generosity’ of the system. Currently, individuals who make a minimum of 750 contributions earn a payout of $3,500 per month from the fund. With the population living longer, the fund has reduced significantly, and, we are told,” The Government is attempting to close the gap.” ‘The bottom line here’, according to Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers Association President Roger Roach, is that ‘the NIS ‘pot’ continues to be depleted by businesses that are neglectful in their ‘coughing up’ of employees’ contributions.’
