Retired NIS officer warns of pensionless future for delinquent self-employed

A former officer at the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) is warning that many self-employed persons, including sex workers, are heading to a pensionless retirement because they are neglecting to pay their contributions.

Insisting that all “gainfully employed people” are required by law to pay NIS contributions once they make sufficient income, Stephen Strickland stressed that those who fail to do so may even be denied a non-contributory pension.

“We have to help some of our people to understand . . . legal or illegal, as a prostitute or whatever, you are gainfully employed when you make $21 a week or more and you are expected by law to make contributions,” he said during his address to the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) St Michael South East branch monthly meeting at the Parkinson Memorial School, The Pine, St Michael on Sunday night.

“A lot of Barbadians, when applying for the contributory pensions, do not have enough contributions. You apply for the non-contributory, you will be interviewed. When you are interviewed, that will go before the board and you will be disallowed. So we have mass persons in Barbados who are self-employed who will never get a pension . . . . We have hundreds and thousands already, but they are silent; they don’t want nobody to know because they are [ashamed],” he contended.

Having worked at the NIS for nearly four decades, the retired officer said he had encountered hundreds of Barbadians who held a mistaken belief that “because your navel string buried here, non-contributory pension is an automatic right”.

However, he said only individuals who were not gainfully employed will get the non-contributory pension.

He again called for the introduction of clearance certificates for self-employed people.

Strickland said this would not only help capture the estimated 24 000 self-employed people that NIS consultant actuary Derek Osborne recently stated do not contribute to the Scheme, but would provide them with protection for the future.

He said this would be similar to the certificates public service vehicle operators were required to obtain when there were difficulties, under a previous administration, getting those in that sector to pay NIS contributions.

In the case of self-employed persons, he said all of them would have to be registered and that registration would be renewed annually, free of cost, once they have a clearance certificate from the NIS indicating they had made their contributions.

“What I am doing to them is protecting them [from] themselves, that when they reach 67 they don’t have to come and lie that they were not self-employed . . . . My thing to you this evening is to get your friends, family, whoever else, who are self-employed to start paying contributions . . . because if they reach 67 or afterwards, you gine got to support them. This is a serious matter,” Strickland said.

During the meeting, Strickland explained and answered several questions on matters such as survivor’s benefits, funeral grants, pensions, paternity and maternity grants, as well as the NIS’ recently announced plan to provide on-the-job injury coverage for self-employed persons.

Strickland questioned the practicality of the latter benefit.

“I don’t know how they are going to get that done because when a person is injured on the job you indicate on the back of your form what happened. A report goes to your employer and the employer either rejects or confirms what happened. Who are you going to send that to if the person is self-employed? What madness!” he said.

(KC)