The government has once again issued a warning to employers who fail to pay their employees’ contributions to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), with Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall reminding them that they could face legal action.
Speaking on Tuesday during his programme “Issues in the News”, Nandlall admitted that “NIS has been one of our greatest challenges.”
He explained that there are two main situations people are confronted with at NIS.
“A large category of persons who worked in the private sector and monies were deducted from them but was never transmitted to the NIS by their employers and that is a tragedy and that is why we’ve said very clearly and firmly, that once we find evidence of employers deducting monies from employees for NIS purposes and are not paying it over to NIS, they will be charged and prosecuted vigorously, because that’s fraud,” Nandlall detailed.
He added, “and then we have another category where persons pay and the employers may have transmitted the record or may not have transmitted the record, but the records can’t be found, and that is a serious situation and a lot of people are affected.”
It is against this backdrop, he outlined, that the government has announced one-off grants ranging from $260,000 to $650,000 for pensioners who do not have 750 contributions to qualify for their NIS pension.
This measure is made possible by the $10 billion which the Government had set aside in Budget 2025 for a one-off payment injection in NIS to address challenges faced by persons who fell marginally short of their contributions to receive a pension from the Scheme.
According to the Attorney General, “I know this is not the solution. I know that not everyone will be pleased. I also know that this is better than nothing.”
The government has repeatedly warned of consequences for employers who fail to remit their workers’ NIS contributions.
“We know, you know, that there are many employers who are actually deducting NIS payments from employees, but are not remitting those payments to the NIS. And that is an offense. That is a criminal offense under the laws,” Nandlall himself had stated in January 2024.
In fact, last year, Vice President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo had revealed that major defaulters were security companies and that the government was going after them.
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