According to its website, www.gosi.gov.sa, the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI) is a “semi-state body,” an independent financial and administrative entity supervised by an eleven-member board of directors. GOSI implements social insurance rules, collects contributions from employers and pays benefits to entitled insured persons and their family members. The activities of GOSI are performed within its head office in Riyadh and twenty field offices distributed all over the Kingdom.
The website advises that the Annuities arm of GOSI is funded by Saudis, who by law must have nine percent of their salaries deducted monthly and turned over to the organization with another matching nine percent contributed by their employers. Non-Saudis and Saudis are covered under the Occupational Hazards section of GOSI, with two percent of their wages payable to GOSI on their behalf by their employers.
The bottom line is that GOSI collects millions of riyals monthly — money which comes from individuals and employers. With that in mind, it might be reasoned that the organization’s website would be very user friendly, so that people could know about GOSI’s activities in detail, and that folks would be facilitated in receiving benefits in their time of need.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. Even though expatriate workers in the Kingdom are covered under the Occupational Hazards section of GOSI, too much of the information on the organization’s English website is obsolete – up to five years old. There are no up-to-date forms in English for families to download and complete in the case of injury or death of their breadwinner. The website provides incorrect telephone numbers for several GOSI offices. Broken links in the site force navigation from the site map.
GOSI’s Arabic online presence is more informative but still far from an ideal e-government website. Finding information at the site is difficult. The site’s search doesn’t search GOSI’s PDF files. Even in Arabic, the statistics are two years out of date. One of the only interactive features at the site, the pension calculator, is so complicated it’s doubtful an average user could make use of it. Websites are supposed to be dynamic, timely, easy to use resources. GOSI’s website couldn’t be described that way.
In a desperate attempt to find something useful at the site, I did download GOSI’s report from 1427H. It was in the form of six PDF files — at least 1 MB each. That’s a painful download on the slow Internet connections common in the Kingdom. Finally, files in hand, I started reading. It was immediately clear that something needs to be done to reduce injuries in certain employment sectors. In 1427, 36,270 non-Saudis were injured in the construction sector and 1,057 Saudis. That was 41 percent of the total injuries reported to GOSI for that year. Trade was second highest with 24,354 non-Saudis injured and 1,692 Saudis injured, or 28 percent of the year’s total injuries. In third place was manufacturing, with 15,191 non-Saudis injured and 2,701 Saudis injured or 19 percent of the total. In 1427, most injuries occurred in the months of March, April and May and the most dangerous day of the week to go to work that year was Sunday. Eighteen percent of all on the job injuries in the Kingdom occurred on Sundays. Why that is, GOSI doesn’t know. But avoiding construction sites on Sundays is probably a good idea.
