– targets enrollment of self employed
HEAD of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon at a post-Cabinet briefing held at the Office of the President, yesterday, informed media operatives that the third review of the operations of the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) began on June 18. “The 2007-2011 years of the Scheme’s operations are being subjected currently to the statutory actuarial review…the social security legislation in Guyana has that important provision for five-yearly statutory reviews, actuarial reviews,” Dr. Luncheon said.
He added that Cabinet Ministers with gazetted responsibilities in the realm of social security, which is in Labour, Finance, Health and the Demographic Statistical Data- Statistics Bureau- are all in association with stakeholders and are party to separate engagements with the actuary.
“The main focus of the review of course is established in the relevant provisions as being the financial operation of the scheme, current and its projections…the TOR (Terms of Reference) for the actuarial review has been set standardly to deal with achieving to comply with those statutory provision,” Dr. Luncheon explained.
Additionally, the Insurance Board and Management of the Scheme have undertaken an expansion of the TOR to have the review address additional considerations that were previously aired.
“…such TOR as eliminating gender bias…that is still unfortunately a feature of some aspects of the scheme’s legislation and the regulations,” Dr. Luncheon said.
He explained that the latter consideration warrants closer attention in the context of Cabinet’s decision made earlier in the year to aggressively and coercively pursue enrolment of the self employed.
“ On a Thursday afternoon, about 8,000 to 10,000 self employed, you can find at Bourda and Stabroek Markets and at the bus stations…the aggressive and coercive approach to enrolling the self-employed obviously has led to the request for looking at the computation for the long-term benefits,” Dr. Luncheon explained.
The HPS said that these measures are being done to ascertain what financial consequences, if any, one can/should expect, if the scheme were to be made more resilient by having its financing put on a more secure threshold, foundation, because of movements in the pensionable age, as had happened elsewhere in other Caribbean Countries.