Nambawan automates super funds

DEPARTMENT of Treasury and Nambawan Super Ltd (NSL) yesterday announced that the state’s superannuation contribution has been automated through the government payroll systems as of pay No. 7 of this year.
The project, “Automation of the state’s superannuation contribution”, has been made possible through the efforts of the departments of Finance and Personnel Management and will be launched at the Crowne Plaza in Port Moresby tomorrow.
Treasury secretary Simon Tosali and NSL chairman Sir Nagora Bogan said in accordance with Section 76 of the Superannuation (General Provision) Act 2000, the state was obliged to contribute 8.4% of the gross salary of each contributing employee as its superannuation contribution.
“From 1990 to April 2012, the government had made state’s superannuation contribution manually: raised cheques that had been paid to NSL especially at the end of each financial year,” they said.
“In view of such obsolete manual payment process, the government undertook a project, which was successfully completed, to automate the state’s superannuation contribution.
“The automated process ensures that the state’s superannuation contribution is electronically transferred through the government payroll systems to the NSL fortnightly.
 “Comparatively, the automated process now ensures that the state’s superannuation contribution is made available fortnightly, which improves financial certainty for both public servants and NSL, and it has reduced related financial and economic costs significantly.”
Tosali and Bogan said one of the essential benefits of the automation of state’s superannuation contribution was enabling the state to be fully compliant to the Act and Section 5 of the Superannuation Regulation Act 2002: ensuring the state to make its full superannuation contribution on a timely basis.
 “Further, the government and NSL are committed to ensuring that past unfunded state’s superannuation contributions are established and addressed through a fiscally-prudent and amicable process,” they said.
“Above all, the State is continuously committed to encouraging superannuation contribution by all its employees especially in the public service and further, encourages economic use of all superannuation savings by the retired employees to support themselves which would then uphold growing young economy of Papua New Guinea.”