Georgetown : The completion of the National Insurance Scheme’s (NIS) Data Entry and Verification Project was announced by Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon.
Addressing the media at his weekly post-Cabinet briefing, Dr. Luncheon said that “it was important for Cabinet to deal comprehensively, with quite a bit of the criticisms that the scheme has attracted by contributors and pensioners, about the deficient contribution records.”
Dr. Luncheon noted that despite indicating that whenever disputed contributions are found, and entered into the NIS’ data base, benefits associated would be compiled, or computed from the date the contributions were made, and not from the date they were entered into the system, that is, benefits, if outstanding, would be accrued and paid, from the time the person became eligible, and not from the time the contribution record was corrected.
Cabinet was pleased that all of the contribution records were entered into the data base system, the Cabinet Secretary indicated.
There was discouragement, he noted, however, in the fact that the final report revealed that 1,115,720 contribution records were not verified byDecember 31, 2014. These unverified records indicate that the aforementioned number of persons have not yet received their benefits.
Dr. Luncheon added that, “The Cabinet felt that this was an “untenable situation” and agreed that “incisive action” was needed to correct this. The unverified contributions lacked information such as names, NIS numbers, or other data needed to allow contributors to be credited with these contributions. Since the NIS could do very little to address this issue internally, the “need for going public” was expressed by Dr. Luncheon.
He further added that “The feeling there had to be an exercise, with a public component, that essentially would assist the scheme with identifying those contributors, who may have deficiencies in their contribution records. If it could be mapped with contributions received by the scheme, then it would be so allotted, and they would get the benefit.” It was reiterated that the benefits would be backdated as previously mentioned.
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