The Deputy Minister of Labor spoke about the reforms promoted by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security regarding Occupational Funds, Panos Tsakloglou, in OPEN.

As he said, “at the moment, in Greece, Professional Funds can be created either sectoral or operational. What we change is that we allow them to be introduced multi-employer funds and, in addition, we put in place rules of good governance and strong supervision”.

At the same time, Mr. Tsakloglou clarified that the accumulated amount in the individual accounts of the insured in Professional Funds remains tax free, until the passing of the bill. Taxation applies to the amounts that will accumulate after the passage of the bill. Therefore, according to the Deputy Minister of Labour, any liquidation is meaningless.

Also, Mr. Tsakloglou noted that the taxation scale has the following characteristics: the more years someone participates in the optional second pillar (professional funds or group insurance policies), the lower the tax rate will be. As he stated, “even if someone has 5 or less years of insurance, then the tax rate for the lump sum it will be 20%, it decreases to 15% for 6 to 15 years of insurance, to 10% for 16 to 25 years of insurance and just 5% from 26 years and above. The percentages for pensions are half of those provided for lump sums (from 10% to 2.5%).

In closing, the Deputy Minister of Labor stated that there is no doubt that healthy economy and healthy insurance go together.

“If one of the two “gets sick”, the other suffers too. In the coming years, we do not expect any significant deterioration due to the fact that unemployment is high but falling at a rapid rate, female employment has been increasing in recent years and multiple pathways to early retirement have been closed, while , with the new bill, we are giving incentives for the employment of pensioners, which means more workers, therefore more contributions” underlined Mr. Tsakloglou.