| Former President- Ceylon Chamber of Commerce (CCC), Chandra Jayaratna has appealed to President Mahinda Rajapaksa not to proceed with the enactment of the Private Sector Employee Pension Fund Bill until several issues about the proposed scheme are adequately clarified, and an open and transparent intellectual debate involving all relevant stakeholders is held.
“I appeal to Your Excellency not to proceed with the enactment of the above Bill, until such time as the following issues have been adequately clarified, and following an open and transparent intellectual debate involving all relevant stakeholders, all such participants agree that the enactment of the Bill in its current form is in the longer term interests of all stakeholders, the country and its people,’ Mr. Jayaratna said in the letter.
Mr. Jayaratna has written to the President outlining the shortcomings in the Bill, in the form of an open letter titled “A Public Interest Critique on the Bill to Establish an Employees’ Pension Benefits Fund”, which contains 40 points on which clarity is sought regarding the proposed Bill.
Among these, Mr. Jayaratna has sought the cost benefits accruing to the covered employees, employers, as well as the socio-economic benefits accruing to the nation and its people in the longer term, as well as the differences between the currently proposed pension benefits scheme and its proposed operations, management, sustainability and control, over the many similar proposals of previous governments that were duly subjected to open public intellectual debate and abandoned due to being deemed as unviable and unjustified in respect of the sustainable cost benefits to employers, employees and the State.
Mr. Jayaratna also wants the Government to present all reports of competent professionals engaged by the Ministry of Finance and Planning, associated Ministries and Regulatory Agencies in the process of designing the pension benefits scheme, setting out economic/financial and actuarial assessments of the viability, desirability and longer term sustainability of the proposed scheme under different sets of assumptions.
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