The Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) has announced plans to intensify efforts to enforce compliance with employee compensation regulations, particularly among state and local governments.

Speaking at a media parley with the Labour Correspondents Association of Nigeria and the launch of a comprehensive enlightenment and enrollment campaign on Wednesday, the Managing Director of NSITF, Oluwaseun Faleye, highlighted the low participation of sub-national governments in the scheme.

“One area that we do have challenges regarding cracking is actually the local government and the state government and that speaks to the question about the number of employees within our subscriber base. Someone spoke about the 7.6 million subscribers and expected that there would be much more. Of course, there should be much more than that if you expect all local governments of the federation to be subscribers, all state governments, coupled with various government employees,” Faleye said.

He noted that while the federal government has shown increased commitment to the scheme, many state and local governments remain non-compliant.

“We have seen that states are largely non-compliant. We intend to engage much more with state governments to bring the scheme to the sub-national level. We are pleased to announce that Lagos State is fully subscribed, and we are engaging with them to realize that we, as an example, will also encourage other states to follow suit,” he added.

READ ALSO: Protecting lives, property remains our priority – Gov Alia

Faleye confirmed that the NSITF’s legal department is taking action against defaulting employers and is working with the National Assembly to secure greater enforcement powers.

“The legal department does have a strategy of really going after subscribers or those that we feel are not paying what they should pay. So in terms of sanctions, we take them to court, and I think we’ve seen improvement from subscribers in that manner,” he said.

“Our strategy going forward is to undertake legal action against those that are not complying and, of course, more persuasion generally until we have revamped enforcement powers from the National Assembly.”

Faleye also called on employees to avoid underreporting earnings in collaboration with employers, warning that such actions could affect their compensation in the event of workplace accidents.

He assured that NSITF is addressing budgetary challenges through advocacy and awareness while working with the Head of Service to streamline the scheme’s implementation across all levels of government.