Classify leave in timely fashion

A High Court judge has urged the various divisions within the protective services to revisit their procedures for leave classification so that employees can submit their claims to the National Insurance Board (NIB) within the stipulated time period of a year.

Justice Ronnie Boodoosingh made the call after he ruled that two decisions of the National Insurance Appeals Tribunal were invalid as the body did not have the legislative power under the National Insurance Act to allow the appeals of a coast guardsman and a fireman.

Both the coast guardsman Canuth Johnson and Russel Hamid, the fireman, suffered injuries while on duty. As with all members of the protective services, which fall under the Ministry of National Security, the two had to wait for their respective organisations to classify their leave before they could make a claim for injury benefits to NIB.

In the two cases, they were told by the NIB their claims were filed later than the statutory time limit of 12 months from the date of the injury and were disallowed. The two appealed to the tribunal, which overruled the NIB’s refusal to allow their claims. In March, the NIB sought to have the tribunal’s decisions reviewed. They were represented by attorneys Bryan McCutcheon and Tonya Rowley while Josephina Baptiste-Mohammed and Maria Belmar appeared for the tribunal. Boodoosingh said the tribunal attempted to create an exception for employees in the protective service who must first have their leave classified before they are able to apply for injury benefit.

“The legislation does not make a distinction between those officers and all the other employees in this country who may need to make such claims from time to time. So that the legislation makes no such distinction, it is not the duty or the function of the defendant (tribunal) to attempt such a feat,” he said. He said extending the time stipulated for the filing of claims beyond 12 months was also not contemplated by the Act.

“I must add that it is perplexing to me why it should take more than 12 months to have a person’s leave classified as injury leave. This must be a simple verification process,” he said.

Admitting the regulations under the Act had resulted in dreadful consequences to both men, Boodoosingh said the system of classification within the protective service was “patently inefficient.” Because of the length of time in which it took Johnson and Hamid to receive a classification of their injury leave, they fell outside of the 12 month period. Johnson’s claim was filed with the NIB a little over 16 months after his injury while Hamid’s was filed some 15 months after his injury on the job.