NIS to commence countrywide compliance campaign

Oct 19, 2016 News

The National Insurance Scheme (NIS) will be executing a countrywide campaign in an effort to engage employers, self-employed persons and employees on matters relating to compliance and benefits.
According to Publicity and Public Relations Officer Dianna Baxter, the exercise is intended to expand social security coverage to the working population. Compliance officers displaying their badges will be visiting all business premises to carry out the programme.
Last month, when NIS celebrated 47 years as a social security entity, compliance was described as the most challenging issue facing the scheme. Acting General Manager Holly Greaves had said that the main source of income comes from contributions paid by employers on behalf of their employees.
She said that when employers are delinquent, the financial operation of the National Insurance Scheme and its contributors are negatively affected.
Faced with this situation, the scheme announced that plans are in the pipeline to begin enhancing the scheme’s debt recovery strategy, with emphasis on cost reduction and time. The scheme also intends to implement a monitoring system to minimize employer delinquency.
Greaves had said that employers should be on the alert, since the agency will be launching several campaigns commencing in the last quarter of 2016. These campaigns, according to Greaves will target not only delinquent employers, but attention will be focused on those inactive and dormant employers.
NIS also plans to place emphasis on its Information Technology capacity, whereby it plans to conduct a programme on data cleansing for its 133,000 contributors. Greaves had said that contributors are being encouraged to utilise the online services to make payments.
Additionally, Greaves said that beneficiaries should also try to uplift their benefits through the bank so as to ease the stress of waiting in long lines.
These sentiments were also expressed by Chairman of the NIS board Dr. Surendra Persaud. He said that using the bank system would take pensioners out of the long lines at post offices.
He added that using the bank system, pensioners can better monitor their spending, as they can make withdrawals at their own convenience. Safety was also mentioned as a great benefit, since pensioners would not have to stand the risk of having all their benefits on their person, thereby reducing the possibility of robberies.