There is need for a more uniform, humane approach by NIS and staff to contributors, claimants

I read with sadness, but not surprise, Mr. Rampaul Chetaru’s letter in your yesterday’s edition narrating the delay in the approval and payment of his National Insurance Scheme pension. According to Mr. Chetaru, he attained the age of sixty on the 24th February, 2018 and filed for his pension on 3 January, 2018.

Editor, without in any way taking away the pain of Mr. Chetaru who is now unemployed, and for whom the NIS pension will probably be his main if not only source of income, our experience is that there are many other similar cases. Too often, the NIS, which is charged with the duty to manage contributions by the self-employed and the employed and their employers for the payment of short-term and long-term benefits, comes across as uncaring, if not callous.  

Continue reading “There is need for a more uniform, humane approach by NIS and staff to contributors, claimants”

The NIS should invite persons who have been deprived of their entitlement to establish their claims by providing reasonable evidence of their employment history

To mark the 49th Anniversary of the National Insurance Scheme, Kaieteur News’ editor and columnist Adam Harris devoted his September 30, 2018 column with a paean to Forbes Burnham with the opening line reading “Forty-nine years ago, Prime Minister Forbes Burnham conceived the idea that there should be a National Insurance Scheme.” In his second sentence Mr Harris, wrote “Whatever sparked the idea I would never know because the thought process was not documented.” These two sentences are serious cause for concern.

First, Burnham did not conceive of the idea of the NIS in Guyana. The idea goes back to British Guiana in 1954, which the PNC Labour Minister Winslow Carrington, acknowledged in introducing the NIS Bill in 1959. And second, although the NIS is not a popular subject for academic interest, the diligent researcher – or journalist – has no major difficulty in finding quite useful and, at times, counterintuitive information on the NIS, thus avoiding any quixotic search into some dead person’s head.

It would be harsh to suggest that the misstatements in the column were deliberate or an attempt to rewrite history. Still, the column states rather loosely and dubiously that the then political opposition protested that Burnham was taking money from the poor people, without acknowledging that despite their criticisms of the Bill, that the pensionable age of 65 was too high, and that casual workers and domestics should be covered, the parliamentary opposition, miniaturised in the first of a series of rigged elections one year earlier, voted in support of the Bill.

The columnist must also be aware that the Government eventually reduced the pensionable age and ironically, that it was the perpetuation of Mr Burnham’s economic policies which first placed the NIS in difficulties in the eighties.

Moving to contemporary matters, Mr Harris also reports Ms Holly Greaves, General Manager as “insisting” that everyone gets their entitlement from the NIS. Having served the NIS in a senior capacity for decades, Ms Greaves would be acutely aware of the serious deficiencies in its maintenance of contribution records. While there has been some commendable improvements, there are still hundreds of thousands of contributions which, for various reasons, have not been credited to the respective workers. But perhaps even more serious are the number of workers’ contributions which were deducted but not paid over to the NIS by employers, which the NIS did not pursue.

The law requires that such contributions be recognised and credited to the workers. Perhaps out of concern about the financial impact arising from claims from thousands of affected persons, the NIS has been resisting such claims despite compelling evidence of which the NIS management is aware.

Taking the General Manager at her word, I would like to ask that the Board and the management of the NIS make a public declaration and invite persons who have been deprived of their entitlement for years, to go into the NIS and establish their claims by providing reasonable evidence of their employment history. To expect them to have better records than the NIS is unreasonable, irrational and callous.

I would also like to see the Board and the management pursue not only those companies, but also their directors and officers, who have conspired to cheat and rob the workers of the country while threatening the viability of the NIS.

Corporate governance in the two most prominent public companies defined by the personalities, interests of their top executives

The National Insurance Scheme holds 8% of the issued shares in Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL) while Secure International Finance Company Ltd owns 18.49%, a combined percentage of 26.49% of the company’s issued shares. My first-hand information is that both the NIS and Secure International have been trying for years to have a seat or two on DDL’s Board so that they can have a say in the strategic decisions of the board, exercise some control of the executive management and have access to the operations of the company.

I am advised that on every occasion their request has been rebuffed by one or both Mr Samaroo and Mr Persaud, one of whom, in the eternal tradition of the family property, is the current inheritor of the executive chairmanship of the company from the other. What makes this situation so strange is that, on paper at least, Messrs Persaud and Samaroo own only 0.27% of the shares in DDL. An examination of the shareholdings in DDL suggests that what one sees is not necessarily the effective or beneficial shareholding in the company. Continue reading “Corporate governance in the two most prominent public companies defined by the personalities, interests of their top executives”

Caution: Bridge Company helping to sink leaking NIS

Introduction
Recently the NIS has made news on two scores: the first that it will not receive any dividends on its investment in preference shares in the Berbice Bridge Company Inc., and the second that there are more than 1,500,000 contributions which have not been credited to the workers’ account.

I was disappointed rather than shocked when I saw Ms. Doreen Nelson, General Manager of the NIS, sitting passively next to her Chairman Dr. Roger Luncheon announcing that persons were not coming forward to help clear up the contribution mess in the NIS. Ms. Nelson knows that his statement contradicts the experiences of many contributors who try, sometimes for years, to persuade the NIS that the contributions recorded in its records are less, sometimes significantly so, than the actual contributions they have made over their decades of working life and contributions.

A client has been engaged in frustrating correspondence for more than four years persuading the management of the Scheme that his entitlement is a pension rather than an Old Age grant. I myself have had fifteen telephone calls to Ms. Nelson over the matter and all I hear is that the NIS is looking into it. Frustrated with the delay, the poor fellow travelled to Guyana from the USA over the Christmas holidays only to be told that it was Christmas time and the matter would have to wait until the holidays were over!

I reported this to the General Manager several weeks ago. She said that was not good.
Continue reading “Caution: Bridge Company helping to sink leaking NIS”

Forty-four years of the NIS

Introduction
September marked forty-four years since the National Insurance Scheme was launched by Prime Minister Forbes Burnham’s Government. It also marked twenty-one years of the control of the NIS by the PPP/C Government and the Chairmanship of another Forbes, this time bearing the surname Luncheon. The latter and a hard core of directors have led the NIS into a state where the Pension Reserves are now being used up by about two billion dollars per year. The saving grace for the reserves is that short-term and industrial benefits paid out annually are generating surpluses that help to compensate for the reductions in the Pension reserves.

The NIS was established as an actuarial scheme, i.e. one that seeks to balance out its long-term liabilities against its assets and revenues. The way this is achieved is by way of periodic – usually five yearly – evaluations carried out by external independent actuaries. The process is very scientific and involves a review all the data on active and past contributors, past and projected future income and expenses – of which pension benefits are always the more significant item – leading to recommendations generally designed to maintain/restore the actuarial balance of the Scheme.
Continue reading “Forty-four years of the NIS”