Government settles insurance claims of public servants

Anjana Samarasinghe

INSURANCE: The Government is to settle Rs 263 million insurance claims of public servants, which have not been settled last year.

The total claims that were settled last year were recorded as Rs. 557 million and the outstanding claims were Rs 263 million.

Now the Government is in the process of making arrangements to settle these claims, Director of Budgets Mahinda Saliya said. Each year the Government provides Rs. 500 million and public servants contribute nearly Rs. 540 million through their salaries to settle these insurance claims.

Till last year these claims were settled by a private insurance company.

Since this year the Government had made arrangements to takeover this process.

According to the insurance company, they have only received Rs 366 million through public servant contributions last year.

Some State institutes were unable to provide these contributions to the Fund. There are over 600,000 public servants that contribute to the fund and nearly 400,000 public servants contributed last year, he said.

The Government will immediately take action to find out about the institutes that are unable to provide the salary contributions of their officers.

There was an agreement between the Ministry of Public Administration, Ministry of Finance and the insurance company to settle these claims.

This agreement did not come to full effect and resulted payment delay.