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Well, Young says the City Council has a responsibility to make those payments and based on his information the council has not paid those contributions for 13 weeks only. Young outlined the SSB's procedure in dealing with a case like this and also a message for employers and employees in general to avoid this situation.

Dr. Colin Young, CEO - SSB
"An insured person came to make a sickness benefit claim at the board and all claims that are recieved are evaluated and when it was looked at there was no contribution made from her employer, in this case the Belmopan City Council. Our legislation is very clear, is that the legal requirements were not met, the claim has to be disallowed. In this case there is one of the condition in the law that says that in order to qualify for the benefit, an employee would have had to make 5 contributions over the last 13 weeks. In this case that was not met and so the claim was disallowed. In cases like that what happens is that SSB then sends an inspector to the employer and investigates and if that person was employed then they would be assess. That means that essentially it's a demand for the payment for that person and at that point SSB then credits those contributions to the insured person, even if SSB doesn't get paid from the city council. Because what we tried try to do is to minimize the inconvenience to the insured person. SO we assess them and at the moment of assessment we give the contributions to the insured person, we then revised the claim and we pay the sickness benefit and then we go after the employer. If the employer doesn't pay then we would take them to court for them to pay the outstanding arrears."

Reporter
"So where are you in that process right now?"

Dr. Colin Young, CEO - SSB
"We are in the process of assessing the Belmopan City Council and after that should be completed today and afterwards we will then revise the claim, ensure that the insured person would get their benefit and we would then make arrangements with the city council to become current."

"I have to say that every month we have over close to 13,000 employers that have to pay by the 14th of every month and some of them are late, some of them are in arrears and then we do the same process, but the reason why we say to employers that you have to try to make that payment, is because when you have a situation like what happened where one of your employees come in because they are sick - if you are delinquent with your payment then this is one of the inconveniences that occurs with your staff and that's never good.":

"So what we try to do as I said is we try to do those assessments quickly so that we can get the payment. The is very clear. When you are late from the next day we start to assess you with interest, so the employer has to pay what was due plus the interest that is outstanding until the arrears is met."

Reporter
"So you recommend for other workers to come and check or just workers in genera, because they need to know this information?"

Dr. Colin Young, CEO - SSB
"Yes, you need to know and that's why we say it's good to always - in this case what was happening according to what I've seen on the media is that the employee was saying that the deductions were being made from his/her paycheck and in this case then the employer portion along with theirs wasn't coming in. So it's always a good practice for persons to every so often to check to make sure that your contributions are made. The truth is that we have employers who are employing persons who ought to be paying social security who are not paying social security and in some cases we have employers who are in fact deducting the employee portion, but are not paying it in and then what we do is that sometimes we become alerted when an employee comes in and wants a benefit and then we send the investigators out and that helps us then to police the situation, but we ask employees to be vigilant, to make sure that thri contributions are made. They can come into the branch and request a contribution history of all of the places they've ever worked and to make sure that it is done."

Young told us this evening that the situation has been resolved,