The Social Security and National Insurance Trust, SSNIT has disclosed that plans are underway to connect its systems to the National Identification Authority (NIA) for a common card, by 2019.
As a result, the SSNIT has halted the issuance of biometric cards to its contributors who are now undergoing registration for the SSNIT cards.
The Director General of SSNIT, Dr. John Ofori Tenkorang explained that the decision to connect unto the National Identification Authority’s systems to issue the Ghana card is to reduce the multiplicity of data by various government agencies.
“SSNIT has taken a decision to stop issuing biometric cards; we currently do it for pensioners and those who actually need it. We are going to basically phase it out and take the National Identification Card [the Ghana card] as the card that we are going to use to authenticate any individual. This is going to be SSNIT contributors, pensioners and also beneficiaries,” he explained.
He added: “As we know, when a member passes away, we have to pay benefits to nominees…currently we do not take the biometric of nominees and authenticating who is the genuine beneficiary sometimes can be problematic.”
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