The description is what a human will see when Google or another search engine presents its list of sites to them. It may or may not have much effect on search results, but a well-written, relevant description could be the difference between someone clicking on the link and visiting your site, or just skipping over your site and going to another one. An honest, concise description (i.e., not engaged in keyword stuffing) can't hurt search results, may help with search results, and certainly can persuade a human to click on that link. In the end, isn't that the objective?

I suppose it's possible that some search engines are ignoring the description tag when presenting search results, instead choosing to present page content. Maybe they decided the description tag, like the keywords tag, was being abused and should be ignored. There's probably not much you can do about that. In other cases, the page author simply didn't bother to make a description tag.

Don't skip it..it will help you to give information about that particular webpages to the visitors & search engine crawlers

Meta description is plays a vital role in seo. Search engine displays title and description of a webpage in search result as website snippet. So don't skip meta description. You can skip meta keywords; it doesn't add any value and makes a webpage spammy.