The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Senior Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

MYLES Laroda, the State Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister with responsibility for the National Insurance Board, says almost 4,000 people were receiving unemployment benefits while working.

He said officials haven’t decided yet if they will require people to pay the government back.

Mr Laroda previously said it would be outrageous to collect benefits while employed.

The Minnis administration provided unemployment assistance to help people who were out of work due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As I discuss (the matter) with the various factions out there, we have a narrative,” Mr Laroda told reporters before a Cabinet meeting yesterday. “I’ll give an example here. There were some issues with Atlantis employees who have been terminated. The Act will require that for you to benefit or collect unemployment benefits, you would have had to have made contributions for the 52 weeks previous.

“Well, we have individuals who were off for a year and even when those redundancies were paid, you’d have line staff that would only be in the amount of 26 weeks, so those individuals were not working. When they did get their severance, only 24 weeks’ worth of contributions were made so they were left at a deficit. So, that’s going to be a policy decision that the government will have to make with regards to are we are going to bring unemployment relief to individuals who really were not 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.

“My advice that I would have received is there were over 3,000, almost 4,000 people who NIB would have found out from contributions that were made on their behalf by their employers. That’s why we said they were collecting benefits while they were not legally able to do so.”

Mr Laroda said the matter is an ongoing issue.

“It’s an ongoing issue because yet again we’re talking about individuals who would have received their redundancy packages and would have been on that list that, yes, contributions would have been made on their behalf so it’s not fair to them to say they were double dipping because they were at home, not working, they got their severance packages, some of those were garnished by the creditors and so if you got a payment, your contributions were paid, you got nothing from it and you were not eligible to receive benefits from NIB then it’s hard to say that’s double dipping.”