Insurance premiums went AWOL – Kommersant

Individual entrepreneurs from among military pensioners will have the right not to pay contributions to the mandatory pension insurance system. The corresponding bill is now being prepared in the State Duma for the second reading. It is based on the precedent decision of the Constitutional Court, which established that contributions to the insurance pension should be paid only by those insured who can save up for it.

The State Duma yesterday completed the adoption of amendments to the second reading of the bill, which will allow individual entrepreneurs from among military pensioners to pay insurance premiums for mandatory pension insurance voluntarily, Yaroslav Nilov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs, told Kommersant. “We expect that this bill will be finally adopted in May of this year without major conceptual changes,” he said.

Recall that in March of this year, the State Duma adopted in the first reading the amendments to the Federal Law-167 “On Compulsory Pension Insurance in the Russian Federation” developed by the Ministry of Labor. They remove from military pensioners who have already begun to receive a departmental pension – it is formed within the budget of the Ministry of Defense – the obligation, after retirement, when registering as an individual entrepreneur, to pay insurance premiums for mandatory pension provision to the budget of the Social Fund (until 2023 – the Pension Fund) . The amendments are based on the decision No. 42-P of the Constitutional Court published in the fall of 2022 in the case of military pensioner Konstantin Vorobyov.

In 2016, he retired, having finished working at customs. In 2018, he registered as an individual entrepreneur, which involved paying insurance premiums to the Pension Fund budget (a fixed amount of about 30,000 rubles per year).

However, in 2020, the Constitutional Court published Resolution No. 5-P, by which it exempted military pensioners engaged in advocacy from paying such contributions, on the grounds that this does not guarantee them a second pension. Thus, one of the conditions for receiving an old-age insurance pension in the Russian Federation is the payment of insurance premiums over a period that allows you to form a 15-year insurance period and an individual pension coefficient of 30 units. However, as the Constitutional Court pointed out, for this, lawyers from among military pensioners would have to either retire later than the established age (65 years) or pay higher insurance premiums – this indicates “the absence of a correlation between the conditions for the formation and conditions for the implementation of their pension rights.”

Referring to this decision, Konstantin Vorobyov appealed to the Federal Tax Service (FTS) with a request to release him from paying insurance premiums for pension insurance for the same reasons, and if he was refused, he went to court. Subsequently, he filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court, which recognized that the provisions he disputed were inconsistent with the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

As follows from the explanatory note to the bill of the Ministry of Labor, thanks to the decision of the Constitutional Court, almost 10 thousand people will not be able to pay insurance premiums. The loss of the budget of the Social Fund, according to the department, will amount to 343 million rubles. and require an increase in transfers from the federal budget by the same amount.

Anastasia Manuylova