The Social Security and National Trust (SSNIT) has advised workers, especially, public sector employees to desist from changing their real date of birth. It says no matter the number of times workers under declare their age, retirement will definitely catch up with them.
Northern sector area manager of SSNIT, Collins Opoku reveals on several instance workers came to change their date of birth forgetting that no employer will want to continue working with them if they can no longer deliver.
He also expressed surprised at some employees who register with IDs and later said dates on their own IDs are not accurate. The wrong date of birth he explained is costing SSNIT a lot of resource in setting up committees to certified date of births of workers.
He mentioned NHIS card as the most common IDs employees go to SSNIT for them to effect changes. He further advised employees to provide reliable contact person numbers and state clearly names of beneficiaries and parents.
This, he noted, are very important in determining who to pay the pensions to in case something happens.
Updating beneficiary names, he added is also important and SSNIT officials are available to assist in updating their data.
The new law mandate employers to pay 13.5 to SSNIT, 5 % to the fund manager totally 18%. Out of the 18%, 2.5 % for NHIS to support the contributor healthcare against premium payment leaving 11% for SSNIT to manage for the contributor behalf.
As at January 2021, the highest pensioner in Ghana takes GHC 129,979.51 and the lowest in its top 10 highest pay taking home GHC 37,264,82 as their monthly pension. This, SSNIT said is far above the persons annual salary when in active service. The top 10 lowest pensioner also takes 300.00 with its low being 459,26 cedis.
“SSNIT has been generous to Ghanaian workers by paying retirement benefits far from even their monthly salary when they were in active service’’ Mr Opoku stated.
According to the 2018 annual report of National Pensions Regulatory Authority (NPRA), Ghana has about 3.1million active pension contributors out of 28.83million Ghanaians (World Bank 2017). Ghana’s first tier pension scheme has 1.5million active contributors, with second and third tiers of the pension’s schemes recording 1.67million active contributors.
It is estimated that about 85% of the country’s workforce are found in the informal sector, out of which only 1% contributes to one form of a pension scheme or the other, which the NPRA described as paltry.