Editorial | Unconscionable pension delay

Five years is a long time – sufficient for a child to start, and complete, high school and do a lot of sums in-between. Or for an undergrad to complete his or her medical degree and commence his or her residency. During that time, diligent clerks in the HR and accounting departments of a government ministry could dig through a lot of musty paper files to provide their managers with the information required to compute, and reconcile, someone’s pension.

Hopefully, the latter point resonates with the finance minister, Nigel Clarke. And hopefully, too, with Darlene Morrison, the financial secretary, the top civil servant and accounting officer in Dr Clarke’s ministry. For the final computation of pensions for public-sector employees falls to that ministry. It is they who tell the Accountant General’s Department who to pay, what to pay, and when to pay.

Against that backdrop, we hope that Dr Clarke or Ms Morrison, and preferably both, read Valerie Noble-Myrie’s letter, published in this newspaper last Friday. Ms Noble-Myrie (we assume the person is female) describes herself as a retired public-health nurse – since October 2017. Which is five years ago.

Given that, at the time, the normal retirement age was 60, it is reasonable to assume that was Ms Noble-Myrie’s age in October 2017. She would now be at least 65. According to Ms Noble-Myrie, she spent over 30 years in the public sector.

WAITING TO RECEIVE PENSION

But half a decade on, Ms Noble-Myrie wrote in The Gleaner that she is still waiting to receive her pension and struggling to get a straight answer as to why she hasn’t. She wonders if she will ever get it during her lifetime.

Said Ms Noble-Myrie: “If a problem is detected during the perusal of one’s file, nobody calls for verification. I think that it is safe to say that if one is not persistent and calls regularly for follow-up, then one’s file gets put in file 13.”

The Government does not provide data on the average time it takes between a retiree’s application and the disbursement of his or her pension. Anecdotal evidence, however, suggests that Ms Noble-Myrie’s experience is far from unique. Their frequent complaints indicate that public-sector retirees have a great hassle not only getting on the pension roll, but in staying there. There is the challenge of frequently proving that they are alive and eligible. The system’s rigidities are not very friendly to old people.

Ironically, the elimination of problems, such as described by Ms Noble-Myrie, was among the issues often raised by Dr Clarke in discussions on pension reform legislation, which was passed months before Ms Noble-Myrie’s retirement. That law requires public-sector workers to contribute five per cent of their salaries to a pension fund under a defined-benefit scheme. The pension age was lifted, over five years, in March of this year, to 65.

“Current employee information is paper-based, thus lengthening the period in which it takes to receive a pension,” the finance minister said about one of the information documents on the logic of pension reform. “If records were stored electronically, they would become easily accessible to allow quick calculation of pension benefits.”

DIGITISATION

While the digitisation fits more broadly into efforts at enhancing the efficiency of the public sector, its value to a pension system that covers over 30,000 people – who are joined by perhaps a couple thousand more each year – would be invaluable. Indeed, a new digital human resource management system, which is supposed to give managers and employees instant access to their employment information, has been touted by Dr Clarke.

Perhaps they just have not got around to transferring Ms Noble-Myrie’s to the digital platform. Nonetheless, five years is a long time – sufficient to retrieve the files from a ministry’s registry, to decipher the scribbles in the one-third margin of the foolscap documents, to review payslips, and to determine the accrual rate for someone’s pension. It is certainly long enough for even pompous civil service bureaucrats to craft a cogent explanation of why a pension request is not being honoured. It is enough time to show respect and demonstrate empathy.

Generally, retirees are not wealthy. Their pensions are important. For many, as Ms Noble-Myrie pointed out, if it does not come, it may mean that they might not be able to buy food, pay utility bills, afford doctors’ visits, or fill prescriptions.

“In time,” she said, “death would be the ultimate end.”

Clearly, neither Dr Clarke nor Financial Secretary Morrison shares such a dystopian vision. They will agree, though, that five years is far too long to arrive at a determination of any pension claim – and not provide a clear explanation of why this is the case. It is long enough to push people beyond the margins and over the edge.