By Orville Williams
From a drastic decline in the number of contributors, to a ‘grey area’ regarding the self-employed, the Antigua and Barbuda Social Security Board (ABSSB) continues to be affected by the economic displacement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Utilising only our active insured population, throughout the heaviest stages of the pandemic – which was 2020 to 2021 – we saw as much as 5,000 persons exit the world of work; that is a mix of formal employment and the self-employed,” ABSSB Director David Matthias explained while speaking yesterday on a local media platform.
The shutdown of the tourism sector during the height of the pandemic is mainly to blame for the falloff in contributions, and even though many hotels have reopened and tourism-related businesses have recommenced operations, the gap created during the pandemic period has left the ABSSB with a mountain to climb.
To make the task even more difficult, contributions are still not completely back to what they were pre-pandemic.
As a result, the ABSSB has struggled to meet its payment obligations to beneficiaries throughout the past several months, with the government recently revealing that it injected another sum of cash into the Social Security Scheme – which has been a recurring theme for the better part of the past two years – to ensure that monies owed to beneficiaries for the month of November were paid out on time.
The same struggle has been felt where self-employed contributors are concerned, with many of their business operations hampered during the pandemic.
Matthias revealed that, even though the numbers have improved somewhat in recent time, there is a sort of loophole that causes agony for the ABSSB.
“If you look at the self-employed alone, you may have as many as 3600 self-employed persons registered. Throughout the pandemic, we only had 900 persons actively contributing. That figure has [since] grown to where you’re seeing 1700 persons contributing, but it’s still only a fraction.
“The interesting thing is…new self-employed registrants come in almost everyday or weekly. It therefore means that persons are now transitioning away from what they were doing before to doing something new.
“The [hope] is to see that, as those numbers come on [board], they continue to contribute and they grow. The peculiarity of the self-employed though, is that where these persons do not earn, they are exempted from making a payment to Social Security.
“So, you may have created a new entity…you may begin to earn income, but that income is not sufficient to attract a Social Security contribution.”
Meanwhile, the collapse of LIAT 1974 Ltd in particular has also been contributing negatively to the falloff in contributions to the ABSSB.
Hundreds of the former carrier’s employees are heading into a third year waiting for monies owed in severance and other entitlements since they were laid off in March 2020, and many of them have not been able to find work since then.
This, of course, has caused the workers tremendous financial hardship, and deprived the Scheme of further contributions.
“When you look at the employed persons, the largest sector that was hit was tourism and allied sectors – in particular, transportation. Transportation today remains one of our greatest worry areas until there is significant improvement with regional travel – that is to simply say, LIAT returning to the skies and operating.
“There is a significant number of persons in Antigua, we’re talking [nearly] 500 persons, who are currently not gainfully employed. Even though there is a small cadre that has returned, it still is a significant dip in our contribution income, because these 500, or 400 persons now, are not working.
“So, the road to recovery requires the intervention of the government and it requires the commitment of all, to understand that recovery is going to require every single one of us simply just doing what needs to be done. That is, working, contributing and adhering to what the law requires us to do,” Matthias said.
