NIS record-keeping nothing short of scandalous

Is the National Insurance Board (NIB) waiting for people to die, to avoid paying out their medical claims under the National Insurance Scheme (NIS)?  Independent Senator Parvatee Anmolsingh-Mahabir pondered this while speaking in the Senate Tuesday on the National Insurance (Amendment) Bill. She lamented that the NIB frustrated claimants while at the same time collecting billions of dollars in a scheme of very poor accountability. Anmolsingh-Mahabir suggested that millions of dollars could have been stolen from the National Insurance Scheme (NIS). In 32 years, she said, the NIB had collected $12 billion, but up to 20 percent of this was never credited to the people’s accounts.

She read out the Sixth Annual Actuarial Review of the NIB: “There has to be an element of doubt when as much as 20 percent of the total contributions are not posted to contributors.” Even in this information age, she said, pensioners had to wait months or even years to find out about their accounts. “Record keeping at NIS continues to be nothing short of scandalous.” She said such inefficiency in any financial system created loopholes to manipulate the system and fraudulently siphon out money. “There is a concept in auditing called teeming and lading where monies which are not promptly recorded are syphoned out of a system for many years without being discovered. Funds received at a later date in a pension scheme can be recorded into retirees’ funds only when that fund is needed, three or fours years later, upon the retirement of the individual.”

She recalled “Enron,” to which another Senator declared: “Corruption!”. Anmolsingh-Mahabir added: “Therefore if all the NIS contributions are not properly recorded into all 400,000 individual accounts, then the system opens itself to various types of manipulation.” Remarking that all was not well in the NIS, she declared: “Imagine that Madam President, twenty percent of billions of dollars! To avoid public perception that there is manipulation of NIS funds, accurate record keeping must be a priority,” she added.