The Cayman Islands National Pensions Office has whittled down the number of employers delinquent on payments into workers’ retirement savings accounts from between 600-700 to 159, according to a statement issued Thursday by Acting Superintendent of Pensions Mario Ebanks.
However, the review conducted between April 2012 and December 2013 found that the pensions office is still plagued by incomplete or redundant files and some cases that aren’t being brought before the courts in a timely manner.
According to the Cayman Islands National Pensions Law, any business owner in the islands who fails to pay at least 10 percent of an employees salary [matching 5 percent contribution from both the employee and the employer] commits an offense.
As of June 30, 2013, a total of 1,144 business were listed as delinquent on payments into the private sector retirement system. Those businesses owed a total of $13.7 million to their current or former workers, according to Mr. Ebanks.
Complaints Commissioner Nicola Williams called the situation “a national crisis” in a report released to the press and the Legislative Assembly in October.
Following the release of Ms. Williams’s review, the National Pensions Office – which operates as the private sector pension regulator under the Department of Labour and Pensions – further reviewed some of the “backlogged” cases where companies owed workers pension payments.
Of the 600 to 700 case files reviewed, Mr. Ebanks said only 378 were “valid,” meaning there were hundreds of duplicate or redundant files contained within the pensions office records.
Among those files were six investigations that had become “statute barred,” in other words, at least five years had passed from the initial reporting of the non-payment offense and, therefore, the case could not be prosecuted. A handful of the cases reviewed by the National Pensions Office dated back to as far as 1998.
The pensions office was able to resolve and close some 219 of the “valid” 378 delinquent pension cases as of late January 2014, leaving it with 159 “open” cases to resolve.
“It will be some time until we get caught up with all of the backlog cases, including progressing some for prosecution,” Mr. Ebanks said. “We now have a more accurate position of where we are with respect to the backlogged cases.”
Of the remaining 159 open cases, 84 remain under investigation, six are on a payment plan and 11 were listed as “resolved but not closed.”
Efforts to track down unresolved pension payment cases have led to workers receiving significant monies into their retirement accounts, Mr. Ebanks said. For instance, in 2014, the resolution of 86 new complaints were resolved with an accumulated value of more than $131,000. In addition, two long-running pension arrears cases before the courts were resolved with payments of some $148,000 into workers’ retirement plans, Mr. Ebanks said.
Also, two of the private sector retirement plans had resolved delinquency payments on their own, collecting more than $468,000 in pension payments owed between January and this month.
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