HEAD of the Presidential Secretariat and Chairman of the National Insurance Scheme Dr. Roger Luncheon said, government will not sit by and watch the Scheme fail, adding that they are heeding  the recommendations of the five-yearly actuarial reviews.
He made the statement during his weekly post-Cabinet press briefing held at the Office of the President on Monday.
A recently published staff report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cautioned that a mismatch between pension benefits and contributions threaten the sustainability of NIS. There were other such reports in the local media.
“It is most unlikely, if not impossible, for the Administration or any Administration for that matter, to sit and watch a national institution of this importance to spiral out of control and to end up insolvent,” Dr. Luncheon said, in response to the reports that the Scheme was in a precarious financial position.
He said government cannot close its eyes to the concerns that have arisen and this is why the legislation that established social security imposed the five-year actuarial reviews.
“Not a review by the Government, not a review by the National Insurance Scheme. Both parties do their review anyhow and not every five years, but the actuary, relying on international experience, using the ILO actuarial services. They provide some information over a five-year period about what are the conventional parameters by which we measure a social security scheme,” he said.
The HPS said that this is a standard actuarial review methodology for social security schemes in general “to tell us where we measure up.”
He said the review being completed, the government will decide on the options that will be taken. He said it will be decided “how we configure the actuarial recommendations to accord with national priorities and realities.”
Dr. Luncheon said he does not believe government has been dismissive of actuarial recommendations.
On the issue of the current backlog of information to be updated, he said dedicated efforts have been made to correct this. “We were handling the backlog in metered doses, dealing with a certain number. But then we were told to go full-out to deal with the backlog. So there has been established a permanent project office, and they gon wuk till all de backlog clear up,” he said.
But he said that this will be “a hell of a job” because they are moving from a records-based paper system to electronic and the movement was extremely slow and not well organized. “So the backlog is quite significant. We have, probably up to 1998, cleared up most of the backlog, other than queries,” he said.
Dr. Luncheon said most of the contributions from when the scheme started in 1969 to 1998 have been captured electronically.
But he said from 1989 to 1998 is the problem period and if a contributor is caught in that backlog then it would be a challenge for that person to get his benefits accurately computed.