KARACHI, Sept 7: The government has offered self-assessment and amnesty schemes to the employers who get their organizations registered with the Employees Old-age Benefits Institution (EOBI) by Sept 30.

Speaking at a news conference on Saturday, EOBI chairman Shafi Malik said the EOBI officials would start conducting inspections from October.

He said all the organizations, having at least ten employees, could registered themselves under the self-assessment scheme and pay Rs150 per employee per month.

The EOBI staff would accept their figures and would neither carry out any inspection nor check the books for the first two years.

The employers shall not decrease the amount of contribution and the number of the insured persons registered immediately prior to opting for the scheme and two years thereafter.

The organizations opting for the schemes have also been given amnesty and they would just have to pay the current dues. The arrears, which had been a major dispute in almost all the cases, would not be claimed from them.

He said the organizations against whom the EOBI had already started proceedings to get them registered could not get benefit from the schemes. The schemes are also not applicable to those whose employees had applied for registration before July 1.

He said the EOBI had reserves of over Rs17 billion and earned around Rs6 billion annually from its investment. He said the EOBI had been investing in the national savings and as the rate of return of the government’s investment bonds was comparatively low, it has now decided to invest over Rs1.7 billion in the stock market.

He said over 47,340 establishments, employing over 1.77 million workers, were registered with the EOBI and nearly 210,000 pensioners were getting benefits.

He said so far over Rs8.8 billion had been paid to the pensioners since establishment of the EOBI, while Rs126 million had been paid during July 2002. The amount of pension had also been raised from Rs75 per month to Rs700 per month in the last 26 years, he added.