NPRA Boss Challenges Workers

Employees, who contribute to any of the new three-tier pensions being administered in the country, have been urged to liaise with their scheme operators to correct anomalies in information they provided during registration in order to avoid disappointment in future. Sam Pee Yalley, Acting CEO of the National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA), who made the call at a presentation on pension reforms for senior journalists and editors on Wednesday in Accra, said the indifference by some pension contributors in the country resulted in their untimely deaths, especially those whose employers deliberately neglected the payment of the contributions or defaulted in paying. “I have witnessed about five instances where people who were presented with cheques for their pension entitlements collapsed before me leading to their untimely deaths. This was because they never followed on payments their employers supposedly paid to scheme operators to ascertain whether such claims were true.” He specifically cited the case of a Ghanaian employee of an Indian company who stood against his employers’ payment of pension contributions on behalf of other workers. “He thought he was protecting the foreigners against making excessive payments, little knowing that he was sabotaging his own future. Reality dawned on him at the time of receiving his pensions when he realised that he had been short-changed by his Indian employers who had paid his pension contributions for just two months.” Further advising employees to be up and doing with respect to their pensions, he said the deadline for all employers in the country to submit their workers’ pension contributions expires by the end of April, this year. Mr Yalley therefore tasked pension schemes currently operating in the country under the new arrangements to provide contributors with annual statements on their contributions and if possible quarterly ones. Explaining further, he stated: “Traditionally, the extended family and the community to a large extent, addressed the issue of looking after the elderly, but this has come under extreme pressure due to urbanization, industrialization and migration. He emphasised that “pension schemes have now become the necessary substitute as an old-age security system for the aged, and a modern mechanism to provide retirement income to the aged maintenance of their standard of living.” Public workers agitated for placement on the Cap 30 – a scheme established by the Colonial Government under the Pensions Ordinance No 42, Chapter 30 of 1950, for pensionable staff in the civil and public services) due primarily to the disparity between the lump sum benefits paid by CAP 30 Scheme and SSNIT. To address the concerns, a Presidential Commission on Pensions was set up in July 2004 with the overall objective of examining the existing pension arrangements in Ghana to recommend sustainable pension schemes that would ensure retirement income security for Ghanaian workers with special reference to the public sector.