Retired actuary Charles Herbert has raised an alarm over the major decline in the number of people contributing to the National Insurance (NIS), as he questioned Government’s rationale for continuing to pay non-contributory pensions.“I don’t really understand the room for non-contributory pension. That doesn’t seem to be accountable to the public,” he said on Tuesday night during an Institute of Chartered Account of Barbados (ICAB) webinar on Our NIS - The Way Forward.The latest review of the NIS showed that the number of employees plus self-employed contributors to the scheme had fallen from 126 802 in 2007 to 105 585 last year, and could decline further this year to 104 384.The number of employers contributing also declined from 8 272 in 2007 to 5 909 in 2021. That figure is expected to remain the same this year.Herbert insisted that while Government could not avoid making adjustments to the structure of the NIS, he believed a “huge” part of the solution for the scheme was capturing self-employed individuals.
