By Moses John
Abuja
Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) and Nigeria Employers Consultative Association (NECA) at the weekend agreed on the items that constitute payroll of enrollees into the Employees Compensation Scheme (ECS).
The agreement was reached when the two organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Lagos at the NSITF-NECA Safe Workplace Intervention Project (SWIP) 2016 and Problem-solving Clinic on the ECA 2010.
Director-General of NECA, Mr. Segun Oshinowo, said the need for a revision of payment of workers’ one per cent of payroll by employers led to the setting up of a joint committee whose work gave birth to an agreed term for the definition of the payroll and mode of deduction.
He said the products of the committee’ work formed the basis for the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed by the two organizations.
According to him, the MoU spells out the items that constitutes payroll with pension, as special allowances exempted from the list.
The NECA added that it provided clarity of definition as far as items that constituted “what a payroll is within an organisation.”
On his part, the Acting Managing Director of NSITF, Ismail Agaka, commended NECA for its “supportive role” since the commencement of the scheme.
Agaka disclosed that over 51, 000 employers had registered with the scheme and about 6,004,015 employees had been covered, stressing that if those registered were matched with the number of employers and employees in the country, the coverage “is still considered very low with a lot more work is required to be done in order to extend the coverage.”
“We have a family whose breadwinner died and after the computation of the entitlements, we are now paying up to N1.3 million monthly to the beneficiaries. That represents 90 per cent of the last income of the deceased breadwinner,” he said.