FOR AUDIT OF SOCIAL SECURITY INSTITUTE

Mozambican Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario on Monday demanded an audit of the overdue accounts of the National Social Security Institute (INSS).Making what he described as a routine working visit, Rosario said “I note that the accounts for 2013, 2014 and 2015 are delayed. This does not benefit transparency, and so I am urging the Institute to publish these accounts with all possible urgency, and to hold an internal audit”. He also wanted the Labour Ministry (to which the INSS is subordinate) to send in inspectors “to help the Institute. We want there to be an internal audit before the Financial Inspectorate arrives. We want there to be absolute transparency in the system”. The missing accounts should be published in November or December this year.He urged Labour Minister Vitoria Diogo to assess the performance of the INSS management. “We want the Ministry of Labour to assess the performance of the directors in the areas of finance, human resources and investments”, said Rosario. 

“There must be a constant assessment to know if these are the people who are going to ensure security and efficiency, or whether it ought to be done by others”. He demanded improvements in the way the INSS attends to beneficiaries who visit its offices – these, he pointed out, were the people who own the money that the INSS handles. He gave the INSS a deadline of two months to modernize the counter at which users are seen. Rosario also wanted to see an end to manual registers of beneficiaries by December.The number of contributors to the social security system has been growing in recent months, he noted, and it was essential that INSS staff behave correctly towards contributors. The point of such visits, the Prime Minister said, was to understand how services are being provided and to check whether they are in line with the government’s five year programme for the 2015-2019 period. “You are the guardians of our money”, he stressed.

For his part, the chairperson of the INSS board, Francisco Mazoio, said his team was working “to modernize the Institute, and we are struggling to reach a level of excellence in attending our beneficiaries”. There are currently 1.3 million INSS beneficiaries, of whom 45,000 are pensioners. The Institute claims to be financially healthy with a total revenue last year of 7.4 billion meticais (about 195 million dollars) and expenditure of 5.5 billion meticais.