Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon will continue to remain as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) even as Head of State, Ramotar has agreed to have the Alliance For Change (AFC) submit a financial nominee to sit on the board.

The disclosure was made by the AFC following its recent meeting with President Ramotar and a team of Government officials this past week, inclusive Dr Luncheon and Presidential Advisor Gail Teixeira.
The AFC following the meetings with government disclosed that while it had asked how early will the Board members be removed it was told Dr Luncheon will remain.
The AFC had recommended that the entire board of NIS be replaced, “however the government indicated that Dr. Luncheon will remain as Chairman, with new members assisting the board.”
The party has since stated said that the President has indicated that he would be open to having an AFC financial nominee to the NIS Board.
Dr. Luncheon during the course of the meeting on Thursday last was critical of Opposition bashing of the NIS and making out that the NIS is about to collapse.
He is to circulate government’s discussion paper on NIS to the AFC.
The combined opposition has recently been critical of the financial affairs.
Finance minister, Dr Ashni Singh in this year’s budget presentation had announced that payment contributions to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) will have to be increased by one per cent, and according to the entity’s latest annual report, it paid more than it earned by several hundreds of millions.
Dr Singh presented the annual report for 2011 to the National Assembly, and it states that while the entity earned $10.8B from its contributions, its returns on investments dipped below the $1B mark to just about $990M.
Total expenditure for NIS in 2011, however, was recorded at $12.2B with more than $10.7B of that money going towards the payment of benefits.
This amount paid, according to NIS General Manager Doreen Nelson, represents an increase of 14 per cent when compared to the previous year.
NIS utilised just $1.4B of its earnings in 2011 to cover its administrative expenses while another $7.9B was paid over in old age benefits.
The scheme had earned $11.2B from contributions the previous year while its returns on investment had seen revenue totalling $1.2B in 2010.
NIS also saw a significant increase in employers being registered with 653 coming on board, while 619 were said to be small-scale employers, each with no more than 10 employees.