Akis Tsoufis

The parliament is expected to open only for the elections to be officially announced and to close again, but this does not mean that the pencils will come down in the EFKA – as, after all, in the AADE with the collection of taxes and controls for tax evasion.

Even so, with the big thorns of the main and auxiliary pensions almost completely settled, the speeds are expected to increase in order to deal with by the end of June a multitude of other outstanding issues that until now had been kept in the background.

The most important of these have to do with:

PARALLEL-SUCCESSION INSURANCE : Described as the biggest missing wound at the moment and it is estimated that around 12,000 are in the queue since May 2016. It’s not that they don’t receive a pension but they are due a supplement – as many of them (eg doctors, lawyers, engineers who also worked for the State) were insured in 2 funds – which could not be calculated until now due to a ..failure software. The software finally went live about 8 months ago, staff were trained on it, and about 4-5,000 cases have already been cleared. In fact, the first payments of those owed have been made, which in some cases reached €35,000.

The goal now is to issue approximately 9,000 such pensions by the end of May and the rest by the end of June.

ONE-TIME EXPIRATION : As for the one-offs concerning the private sector, almost everything has been cleared. There are about 150 hotel staff cases left which are expected to be given by the end of June.

For the State, the pending cases number around 5,000, of which at least the overwhelming majority are planned to be dealt with within a 3-month horizon.

RE-CALCULATION OF PENSIONS : 70,000 pensioners after 2016 are waiting for their pensions to be recalculated according to the provisions of V. Vroutsis for higher replacement rates for those with more than 30 years of insurance. The recalculations – which are expected to be completed by the summer – are expected according to information from Skai.gr. lead to average pension increases of 5%. Of course, the more years of insurance, the more the extra money, which can reach €140/month for those with 40 years of insurance.

WIDOW’S PENSIONS : They refer to cases where the deceased was an active insured person and there is enormous difficulty in obtaining his/her pension and then paying it to his/her widow. EFKA’s books have around 5,000 such cases and the special software required for these pensions to be issued within just one month of the insured’s death will start working in May.

At the same time, in EFKA they plan to run the utilization of the real estate that numbers more than 400 properties worth about €1 billion, to implement a new procurement system so that it does not take 18 months to buy an air conditioner and to fully connect EFKA with the KEAO.