A?former?chairman?of the National Insurance Board believes that the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) should be “immunised and sanitised” from political interference.
“The political flavour in the mix at the NIS is too strong,” Independent Senator Tony Marshall submitted, during debate in the Senate yesterday on the National Insurance and Social Security (Amendment) Bill.
He suggested that the minister responsible for the NIS, Dr Esther Byer-Suckoo, should use “her influence to get the Cabinet to agree that the department should be a closed department.
“It is not a department for social benefits. It is a pension fund and if it is a pension fund it should not have an overdose of political flavour and ingredient”, Marshall said, adding, “the board should be allowed, having been properly immunised, to make professional judgement and when it isn’t done fire the man that is heading up the investment section – that is what happens in other parts of the world”.
