A Belated Pensions Law

The ruling coalition has announced the pension law will be delayed until 2018

Daniela Budu, 19.10.2017, 14:55

The ruling coalition, which convened on Wednesday in Bucharest for talks on the draft budget for 2018, decided that the pension law would be delayed for the next year. The new budget has been drawn by taking into account a 200 billion euros GDP, a deficit target below 3 %, salary tax cuts from 16% down to 10% and pensions raised up to 250 euros.

Referring to the pension law, Senate Speaker Calin Popescu Tariceanu has said, quote, “the law is extremely complicated, thick and entailing measures of unprecedented scale. There are millions of files that must be assessed in order to figure out its impact. The Romanian official has added that a pension revision is needed but only taking into account the next year budget. According to the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Social Democratic leader Liviu Dragnea, the pension revision has been delayed more than expected, due to the huge number of difficult files. Dragnea says the research conducted has revealed huge disparities between the pensions of people who did the same work.

Liviu Dragnea: At the time we began talking about this situation, none of us had figured out the huge intricacies facing Romanias pension system. We need more time to have access to all information and sadly, Romania still has public institutions unwilling to provide the right information in due time. The healthcare system, for instance, has not yet provided the information we need about their salaries. The answer we got was: ‘such information has a strictly personal character, we cannot provide it.

Increasing the value of the pension point, which was stipulated in the ruling coalitions programme, “is not an issue under a question mark, PSD president Liviu Dragnea has told Parliament in Bucharest. The ruling coalition leaders have also tackled the possibility of making the second pension pillar optional, but a decision in this respect will be made only after the Financial Supervision Authority makes its viewpoint clear on the issue.

On the other hand the opposition has called on the government to give up on the spaced-out VAT payment, which is said to become obligatory next year in the case of bad payers, insolvent companies, as well as in the transfer of social security payment from employer to employee. Liberal leader Ludovic Orban says that transferring social security payment to the employee, is only a fiscal artifice aimed at offsetting the shortage of funds PSD needs to meet its election pledges. A final decision on the 2018 draft budget is to be made next week.