employment after recovery. Moleer, only those persons expecting to claim benefits may elect to pay additional contributions, thus increasing the difficulty of assessing appropriate rates of contribution. There would, however, be no objection to additional voluntary contributions that would simply be accumulated and repaid with interest on withdrawal, death or retirement.
9. It would seem essential that the definition of earnings for the purpose of assessing contributions and for calculating rates of benefit should be identical.
Sickness and Injury Bonefits
10. As our report indicatos, it would not be unduly expensive to increase the period for which sickness and injury benefits are payable beyond the fourth month of sickness. Payment up to the end of the sixth month might be worth considera- tion. It would be desirable to provide that spells of sickness separated by no more than a short interval should be counted as one spell and that, once the and of the benefit period had been reached, no further benefit should be payable until the member had requalified by payment contributions for some prescribed
period.
11. We note that under current legislation, employers must pay a sickness allowance to employees who are sick for up to 36 days. It would be desirable, to say the least, that sickness benefit under the proposed scheme should begin
when sickness allowance ends, without either a gap or an overlap.
12. It is an essential feature of a sickness benefit scheme that there are
sufficient doctora who can be trusted to give an unbiassed opinion as to fitness
for work and that certificates of incapacity be obtained from them. We do not know enough of local conditions to comment further, but there would at least need to be machinery for investigating dubious claims.
Benefit on death while insured
one.
13. The proposal for a lump sum of 6 months' earnings see a reasonabl There might need to be a short waiting period before a contributor who had re-entered the scheme after a previous refund of contributions became entitled to benefit. If desired, it would not be unduly expensive to increase the amount of benefit up to a year's earnings, but it might be prudent to wait until the
age distribution of those joining the scheme is known.
14. It would need to be decided whether death benefit should be payable only if the person concerned was contributing or drawing sickness or injury benefit (and perhaps if he had continued to be sick after exhausting his right to benefit)
3.