By Bibi Khatoon
The cash-strapped City Council has found itself in a position where it has to find between $5 – $7M every month to honour its debt to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS).
The City council owes a total of $134M to NIS. At a press conference on Tuesday, the Council’s Treasurer, Ron McCalmon said $10,399,000 was paid over to the NIS on February 9 and an agreement was reached to make the remaining payments in instalments.
“We would have had meeting with the management of the National Insurance Scheme and we would have come to an agreement in terms of the process of paying the arrears that is outstanding. The agreement that we would have met with is that we keep the current payment up to date as well as make those arrears payments so that it could be liquidated,” the Treasurer noted.
To meet this obligation, he said efforts will be made to intensify rate collection of which over $4B is outstanding.
As it relates to the Guyana Public Service Credit union, over $11M was paid over in January.
“For Credit Union, we would have owed $36M, NIS $116M but when we would have done reconciliation with them, of course, the interest which is $134M –we would have started paying already.”
Meetings are yet to be held with the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and other agencies to pay off monies owed.
During a protest in November 2017, the Guyana Local Government Officers Union (GLGOU) said the Council has been deducting monies from workers’ salaries but failed to make remittances to the agencies.
