– Town Clerk
OUTSTANDING payments by Georgetown Mayor and City Council (M&CC), to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) for Pay As You Earn (PAYE) taxes, have resulted in the non-payment of April monthly salaries to municipal employees. The Municipality owes a total of $115M to the two entities and is aiming to pay some each month but, according to Town Clerk Yonette Pluck, it will not be able to do so this month until it has been able to deal with those debts.
At the fortnightly statutory meeting in City Hall on Monday, Pluck informed councillors that workers have been writing to voice their concerns to the Administration over the NIS/PAYE issue.
But Mayor Hamilton Green declared, that is no new matter.
Meanwhile, City Treasurer Andrew Meredith told the Guyana Chronicle that the delay in paying for April is due to the $15M that the Council paid towards the amounts due and he is hoping to have workers paid early in May.
The financial situation at the M&CC continues to get worse as the months go by and the indebtedness is so distressing that Meredith had, in the past, complained of sleepless nights.
“It bothers me. I can’t sleep. The situation is so dire. Imagine we haven’t paid NIS since August 2010,” he had revealed to councillors at a statutory in July 2011.
“I have been part of the system of allowing us to break the rules. Since August 2010, we have not paid NIS. How much longer am I required to continue to break the law?” Meredith wondered.
He declared that the Council’s finances are being dealt with too much in isolation.
“We have to understand how we got here. In fact, we are still here because nothing has changed, in terms of the salaries bill,” Meredith observed.

TOO LAX
However, some authorities have accused NIS of being too lax in their dealings with errant employers.
At a recent weekly post-Cabinet media briefing at Office of the President, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon said: “I blame the Scheme to a certain extent. The behaviour of the NIS, with regard to quite a few of errant employers, has been a bit too tolerant.”
Luncheon, who is Chairman of the NIS Board, pointed out that Georgetown is not the only municipality that has fallen foul of the Scheme’s legislation, as regards collecting contributions and handing them over.
“Probably others would be identified by the zealous members of the media,” he remarked.
Luncheon maintained, though, that the Scheme has been unduly tolerant and anticipated more revelations on the issue.