The Social Security Fund of Rwanda (SSFR) has launched a country-wide campaign to seek out all fund defaulters and unregistered employers in a move to recover unpaid contributions. Under this campaign, qualified auditors and inspectors will conduct a door to door employers search and organisational accounts audits geared towards exposing all existing defaulters and subsequently enforcing the recovery process. Currently the fund has collected 80 percent of the Rwf 19bn targeted. The fund’s Principal Public Relations Officer, Daniel Kayonga, said the exercise will help identify existing defaulters. “We are saying that the honeymoon is over for defaulters. We will track them down and the consequences will be severe. We have tried to talk, persuade and sensitize employers yet some continue to avoid the obligatory contribution to the SSFR,” Kayonga said. The five-day exercise will see to it that employers and employees contributions as stipulated in the law are recovered. “The law mandates all employers to declare on every quota of the year the amounts they will be submitting to the fund; the amount is comprised of 5 percent employer contribution and 3 percent of individual employee salary. All 8 percent goes into the employees social security account,” he said. “Many employers deduct these amounts from their employees yet they don’t forward the amounts to SSFR.” Out of the 300,000 registered employers, only 90 percent of these faithfully contribute to SSFR accounts, with the remaining either not known or just still at large. “We are serious on this. We have a lot of defaulters and it is against the law.We are also aware of some employers who continue to work and hire without registering with us. We also know of others who are registered but are not consistent when it comes to contributing to the fund; they only pay once and then dodge further contributions,” he said. Kayonga noted that some employers have deliberately under-declared their employees salaries so that they can pay small amounts to the funds hence the organisations audits emphasised in the campaign. According to Kayonga all SSFR defaulters will face heavy penalties that could see most of them going out of business. The identified defaulting employers will be charged up to 3 percent interest rate of the total amount per month and the figure accumulates to 36 percent in a year. Ends
