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as President announces establishment of special secretariat – says diaspora concerns, passport backlog will also be addressed
PRESIDENT Dr. Irfaan Ali has announced that a special secretariat will be created to handle the backlog of almost 10,000 tribunal matters at the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) by the end of the year.
During a live broadcast on his official Facebook page, the Head of State revealed that the NIS management has been directed to establish a secretariat and a system for addressing pending matters.
“Files that deal with appeals, claims, queries, investigations, tribunal matters…we are going to develop a special secretariat and a projectized format to bring to an end or bring to closure, these 10,000 files before the end of the year, so that we will be back in real time,” President Ali said.
Over the last three years, over 4000 matters were addressed through outreaches that were organised by the government.
“This is an issue that we want to fix and we are going to make every effort in a specialized projectized manner to get this fixed before the end of the year,” he reiterated.
Meanwhile, there are 300 diaspora matters that are also pending. For this NIS will conduct a diaspora outreach in November, with persons from New York and Toronto.
“What we want is members of the diaspora to send to the diaspora unity in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs their issues in relation to NIS with all the supporting documentation so that can be sent to the NIS now and we can start looking at issues and advising a status of your claims, objections, your queries or your investigations.”
“There is a lot of background work that has be done, but we are committing ourselves,” he added.
PASSPORT BACKLOG
Meanwhile, a similar mechanism will address the county’s passport backlog. Currently, the country is plagued with a backlog of over 5,000 passport queries, however, this is not a result of any shortages.
In fact, the President believes citizens have not being utilizing their respective regional offices.
“What I have seen is that people are not utilizing the regional offices. Take, for example, in Georgetown we have about 4,000 passports in the backlog; in Berbice, about 900 passports in the backlog; Linden, about 102 passports in the backlog; Anna Region, 103; Parika, 45; Bartica five.”
Meanwhile, there are 400 passport related matters that are pending in the diaspora.
The relevant authorities have been given up to next Friday to have this backlog addressed.
“I have brought together the team and they are working now in a consorted way, 24 hour shifts to have this entire backlog of 5,300 plus a backlog for 400 for the diaspora, so that is just about 5,700 passports in the backlog nationwide and in the diaspora. They are working to completely bring to nil this backlog by next Friday,” the President said.
