State benefits go to private pension

From 2024, the Ministry of Labor plans to oblige non-state pension funds (NPFs) to transfer data on corporate and individual private pensions to the Social Fund. From there, information will be sent to the Unified State Social Security Information System (EGISSO) for a more complete account of the income of families applying for social benefits for poverty, primarily for benefits for children from 8 to 17 years old.

The Ministry of Labor proposes to oblige NPFs to transfer data on corporate and individual private pensions to the Social Fund – a draft law on this has been published by the department for public discussion on regulatiton.gov.ru. It, as indicated by the Ministry of Labor, was developed on behalf of Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova dated April 22 this year. The Ministry of Labor proposes to introduce into the law “On Non-State Pension Funds” the obligation of NPFs to send data on the facts and amounts of paid non-state pensions to the Social Fund (an amalgamation of the Pension Fund and the FSS). They will be transferred to EGISSO, which accumulates data on social payments due to Russians. Let us recall that EGISSO will in the future become part of the “social treasury”, which will be managed by the Social Fund.

According to the Ministry of Labor, according to the legislation, the appointment of a number of social payments should take place on the principle of targeting and need, in particular, they are taken into account when calculating the average per capita family income for assigning benefits for children aged 8 to 17 years (it takes into account pensions). The FIU has been identified as the source of information about them, but it does not have data on recipients of pensions under corporate and individual pension agreements, which “makes it difficult to take into account … income when establishing the rights of citizens to receive social protection measures,” the Ministry of Labor notes.

As follows from the data of the National Association of Non-State Pension Funds, the number of participants in voluntary pension programs in the Russian Federation at the end of 2021 amounted to 5.2 million people, the majority are members of corporate NGOs (3.8 million people, including 1.4 million recipients, in on average – 3.9 thousand rubles per month), another 2.1 million people (including 70 thousand recipients, an average of 2.8 thousand rubles per month) participate in individual pension programs. Over the past year, NPFs managed to attract about 280,000 people to such programs (more than 150,000 to corporate ones, about 130,000 to programs for individuals). The size of the average contribution under corporate programs increased by 16% compared to 2020, from 33.9 thousand to 39.3 thousand rubles, for individual programs – by 44%, from 11.5 thousand to 16.6 thousand . rub.; the average amount of savings in corporate programs is 306 thousand rubles, in individual programs – 53 thousand rubles.

It should be noted that although the government intends to make social payments more targeted and focus them on helping poor families — in 2023, according to the promise of the Ministry of Finance, up to 40% of all benefits will be paid this way — the practical benefit of taking into account data on private pensions may turn out to be small. The participants of such programs are either employees of large Russian companies, or those who are able to form their own individual pension, and their income obviously exceeds the legal limit for receiving benefits, which is reflected in the accounting system without data on these funds.

Anastasia Manuylova