Social security agency receives 500 claims daily

Each day an average of 500 Barbadians claim benefits from the country's National Insurance Scheme (NIS) with 25% of total claims representing unemployment benefit, newspaper Daily Nation quoted NIS director Ian Carrington as saying. "Unemployment typically runs about a quarter or less than sickness claims. So if I get 5,000 sickness claims in a month I can expect to get 1,000 unemployment claims," Carrington said, adding the other claims were submitted for invalidity and maternity, among others. NIS's benefits department has registered a significant upswing in business in 2003, particularly in the last quarter, Carrington added. "Usually we process roughly between 5,000 and 6,000 claims on a monthly basis but during the last quarter of this year what we saw was a significant increase in the number of claims we received," he said. As of mid-December this year, the NIS held assets of over 1.5bn Barbados dollars (BBD) (US$757mn), of which BBD$1.1bn was invested locally, with BBD$895mn in government bonds and BBD$281mn in other investments. The INS also has offshore investments of BBD$90.3mn.