SELF-EMPLOYED persons have been warned to contribute to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) to ensure that they have contributions to draw on in their old age.
This advice came from Prime Minister Freundel Stuart as he spoke in the House of Assembly yesterday on the amendment to the National Insurance and Social Security Act to extend the period of waiver of interests and penalties both to employers and to self-employed persons.
Stuart lamented that many self-employed persons from all categories were negligent in paying into the scheme though many of them were in a position to so do.
“One of the issues that have bedevilled the scheme is that self-employed persons have not always lived up to expectations in terms of their support of the scheme,” Stuart said.
He added that even though the law required them to support the scheme, “when they are delinquent the costs to the scheme is monies owed”.
“But more costly for the country is the situation in which the lower categories of self-employed persons who are out there in the society making a lot of money for which they don’t account to the [Inland Revenue Department] or the National Insurance Scheme.
“They live unfortunately profligate lives, spend wildly and when the time comes for them to lay their burden down, as it were, and they are looking around for a National Insurance pension, they suddenly realize that they have not made the requisite contributions to the fund and therefore there is no pension available to them.”
The Prime Minister said the “old concept of an old-age pension based on reaching a certain age is something of the past and one of the tasks of this government … is trying to get self-employed persons of whatever category in Barbados to understand that they have to plan for their declining years, and the best way to do so is to contribute to the National Insurance Scheme while they are able to work and make money”.
He said the situation was reflected even with constituents.
“Constituents come quarrelling, saying that they don’t get any pension; they have passed age 65 . . . and then they have to live on welfare and sometimes be a burden to their relatives and eventually a burden to the state, when in fact large sums of money would have passed through their hands when they were working as barbers, as vendors, artisans and fishermen. . . ,” he said.
