The Budget for 2015 allows insured persons to pay up to a maximum of five years of missing contributions. How kind! Or is it? If a person earning an average salary cares to do his maths, he will realise that the resulting amount will be more than several thousand euros.
The conclusion has to be that there are too many people out there who will wish to settle their missing contributions but simply cannot afford it.
Besides, those who can afford to pay for the contributions that were not settled are most probably the ones who will have no interest in doing so because getting a smaller State pension will make no difference to them at all.
The idea of offering pension-related concessions to the wrong type of people seems to me to be no more than an inversion of Socialist as well as both moral and egalitarian principles.
The argument gets even more serious when it is realised that those who may need to settle outstanding contributions are not necessarily the ones who truly had not paid up on time.
Under the old law, such persons would have had no missing contributions or, at least, such contributions would have been much less than what they are following the pension reform.
I hope to explain here why, in transitory cases (to be accurate, in cases of those born between 1952 and 1981), the option of settling outstanding contributions tends to constitute daylight robbery rather than social justice.
What is essentially wrong is not the idea of increasing the contribution requirement per se.
The crux of the matter is that, as a result of the pension reform, insured persons born between 1952 and 1981 have had to suffer an increase in their contribution requirement that is higher than the increase in their retirement age.
Thus, for example, those born between 1952 and 1955 suffer a three-year discrepancy because they had their contribution requirement increased from 30 to 35 years (by five years) while their retirement age was raised from 60 to 62 (by two years).
It is high time that politicians stop dancing to the tune of the masses
Worse still, those born between 1961 and 1981 suffer a five-year discrepancy because they had their contribution requirement increased from 30 to 40 years (up 10 years) while retirement age was raised from 60 to 65 (by five years).
But why stop at those born on or after 1982? The answer is simple enough. People born on or after 1982 will have no problem paying up the required 40 years of contributions when they retire because they will be retiring at age 65 and they still had not attained 25 years of age when the pension reform was approved by Parliament in 2006.
One can look at the matter on two levels.
Firstly, in transitory cases, the 2006 pension reform arbitrarily and artificially threw insured people backwards in their contribution payments.
It did this in such a way that, owing to certain discrepancies, some insured persons would never be able to put the clock back to reverse the situation.
Secondly, the expectation that, in certain transitory cases, the insured person will be compelled to pay up “missing” contributions in respect of the period of discrepancy applicable to him (for example, three years in the case of those born between 1952 and 1955) only makes the injustice worse.
Indeed, if the contributions in question are viewed in the right perspective, namely, as contributions payable in real time, they will not qualify as “missing contributions” at all.
The insured person was irreversibly thrown backwards in his contribution payments by mere operation of the law and not through any fault on his part.
It is, indeed, a pity that the national authorities, including the Ombudsman, should simply ride roughshod over the transitory problem that is implicit in the pension reform and persist despite the option made available in terms of the 2015 Budget.
It is high time that the government moves to address the dilemma and come up with appropriate solutions.
The government must bring together precepts of social and legal justice as well as common sense.
The result should be easy enough to attain, namely, that the contribution conditions that are applicable to transitory cases will be revised and corrected accordingly in line with the need to eliminate the respective discrepancies.
Accordingly, the contribution condition for those born between 1952 and 1955 must be reduced from 35 to 32 years to eliminate the three-year discrepancy while in the case of those born between 1962 and 1981 it should go down from 40 to 35, to eliminate the five-year discrepancy.
The same principle should apply to all the age categories.
Of course, if the insured person has other outstanding contributions over and above those relating to the applicable period of discrepancy, he will have to settle them in terms of the right of option granted in terms of the Budget.
It is high time that politicians stop dancing to the tune of the masses and assume the responsibilities of true leadership, where what matters is not the will of majority but the common good.