-Minister Singh says, urges NIS staff to provide quality service to everyone

SENIOR Minister within the Office of the President with responsibility for Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, has issued a stern call for improved service delivery within the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), reminding staff that they are on the “front line” of citizen engagement and must keep high standards of professionalism.

Dr Singh was at the time speaking at the NIS’s 56th Anniversary General Assembly, during which he said: “You are dealing with citizens. You have a duty to provide a service to the people of Guyana who come into an NIS office, and it is not good enough to have people waiting, to have them running from one office to another, to have them turned away for some spurious reason. It’s not good enough.”

As such, he stressed that the government has taken a firm stance on the issue, noting, “This government led by President Ali, and I’m saying this openly and publicly, this government led by President Irfan Ali is very clear: we have a zero-tolerance position on citizens not being served well.”

To this end, he expressed dissatisfaction with reports of poor customer service and made a direct appeal to staff members who are unwilling or unable to meet the required standard. “If you feel that you are not in a position to do so for whatever reason, please make way for others who are more willing and able to do so.”

Highlighting the importance of empathy in service delivery, Dr Singh added, “Most of the people who come into the NIS are the elderly and the infirm or the ill, and these people are counting on us to provide service.”

While he acknowledged that progress has been made, the minister emphasised that there is still more work left to be done. “I have seen, of course, vast improvement, and it would be remiss of me not to compliment the board and the management for the tremendous progress that has been made. I’ve seen the backlog of cases cleared up. We’ve cleared up thousands of cases in backlog. We have done a tremendous job in reconciling the outstanding reconciliations that were needed for people’s accounts. But we still have work to do,” he said.

Against this backdrop, the finance minister urged staff to embrace innovation and adapt to the country’s rapid development and said, “I want us to consider that we are doing so at a time when much is changing in our country, and it is changing at a meteoric speed. Things are changing rapidly before our eyes, and we need to stay apace. We need to change the mode in which we are operating. We need to reinvent ourselves, change how we are operating.”

It was then that he said that the manner in which they operate must change to ensure that the scheme remains modern, as an outdated and archaic scheme has no place in modern Guyana.