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NIS seeks consultant to reduce massive backlog
The National Insurance Scheme has advertised for a consultant who will improve its record-keeping
The National Insurance Scheme (NIS) is moving to improve its record keeping with the hiring of a consultant to reduce its backlog of workers’ contribution.
The project has been on the cards for some time now, with an increasing number of complaints, of especially pensioners not receiving their benefits either on time or the correct amount. Lost and poorly kept records and log jams have all been blamed.
In an advertisement last Sunday in this publication, NIS in a “Request For Expression of Interest” said it wanted to hire a short term consultant to provide data entry services in relation to its contribution records and the eventual upgrade of its database. The consultant would be required to enter the date in a specific format which will be provided by the scheme.
“This interface has the appearance of a database with indexed fields for information such as Contribution Schedule, ID, Employee NIS Number, Employee last name, Employee first name, monthly earnings, etc.”
In 2011, Cabinet Secretary and Chairman of NIS’s Board, Dr. Roger Luncheon, announced that the entity has established a project office to handle the significant backlog of cases. He had described as tedious, the process of moving the record-based system into an electronic one, with thousands of cases to be updated and cleared up.
While information from 1969 to 1989 is relatively intact, it is the data from 1989 to 1998 that is the problem.
It is a known fact that hundreds of qualified pensioners who had contributed would turn up to make their claims only to find out that an entire period of contributions is nowhere to be found.
A huge chunk of their NIS pension is then gone. In many cases, the pensioners themselves were not keeping proper records and therefore had no way to prove their contributions.
While NIS reportedly has over $30B in its coffers, there have been warnings that the disparity between increasing expenditure as against income could place the scheme in financial problems in about a decade.
Reports also reveal that surplus is generated yearly. Effective June 1st, government raised the NIS rate from 13% to 14%.
NIS was established in 1969 to ensure workers are assured of earnings in time of retirement and sickness and for medical assistance.
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