Laroda: Some terminated staff did not meet 52-week contribution requirement
NASSAU, BAHAMAS — Some 4,000 people are believed to have “illegally” received National Insurance unemployment payments by “double-dipping”, said Myles Laroda, minister of state in the Office of the Prime Minister with responsibility for the National Insurance Board (NIB).
Laroda told reporters outside Cabinet that a decision has not been made yet on whether those individuals will be ordered to pay that money back.
“It’s fair to say it was in the thousands,” he said.
“My advice that I would have received was there were over 3,000 to 4,000 people who NIB would have found out from contributions that were made on their behalf from their employers, and that’s why we said they were collecting benefits while they were not legally able to do so.”
He said this was discovered some three weeks ago.
Laroda noted that it is an ongoing issue because some of the individuals were workers who received redundancy packages from their companies along with NIB assistance.
He pointed to a matter involving employees from Atlantis who were terminated from the property and were subsequently “off for a year”.
He said even when those redundancies were paid, there was some line staff who did not qualify under the NIB 52-week contribution requirement.
That is going to be a policy decision that the government will have to make with regards to whether we are going to bring unemployment relief to individuals who really weren’t physically on the job.
– Minister of State in the Office of the Prime Minister Myles Laroda
“They were left at a deficit,” Laroda said.
“That is going to be a policy decision that the government will have to make with regards to whether we are going to bring unemployment relief to individuals who really weren’t physically on the job and even though they were bought out, their contributions do not rise to the amount that would enable them to collect benefits.”
Investigations into the matter are ongoing.
The government launched the unemployment program in March 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to aid individuals who were unemployed due to the COVID-19 shutdown.
They further extended the program multiple times.
When the Davis administration came into office, the program was extended from September to the end of December 2021.
The government has also advised that it will provide a $500 lump sum payment to each of the more than 17,000 beneficiaries of the program in order to provide a cushion for the holiday season.
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