What to do with the President's order
The State Duma continues to receive bills to solve the problem of working pensioners: the Legislative Assembly of the Leningrad Region proposes to return the indexation of pensions to them and set the annual recalculation of pensions to a maximum of ten points, not three points. The government is traditionally opposed. Meanwhile, the deadline for fulfilling the presidential order to index pensions for at least working disabled people has expired, but nothing is known about the decisions taken.
The deputies of the Leningrad region wrote their bill back in the fall of 2022 and assumed that it could come into force on January 1, 2023. But since the State Duma cannot accept for consideration initiatives that involve additional budget expenditures without the government’s conclusion, and the government sent its opinion only at the end of March 2023, it has reached the parliament only now.
The explanatory note states that the authors pursue the goal of «restoring social justice for working pensioners and increasing their level of material well-being.» This injustice, in their opinion, consists in the “double limitation” of the size of pensions for this category of Russians. Firstly, from January 1, 2016, pensions are paid to them without indexation — only dismissal guarantees the recalculation and payment of pensions in full. And secondly, from August 1, pensions are recalculated for those who work annually, but by no more than 3 points, although for those who have not reached retirement age, the individual pension coefficient can be a maximum of 10 points annually. At the same time, the rate of insurance premiums paid by the employer for employees is the same for both pensioners and those who have not reached retirement age, if they receive the same salary.
From January 1, 2023, 1 pension point is equal to 126 rubles 13 kopecks. Accordingly, a working pensioner, even with a very decent salary, from August 1, 2023, will receive an increase in his pension of a maximum of 378 rubles 39 kopecks per month.
Deputies of the Leningrad Legislative Assembly propose to return the payment of pensions to working pensioners, taking into account indexation and give them the right to a maximum of 10 points in the annual recalculation. This would require an additional cost of about 530 billion rubles in 2023, according to the financial and economic case in the initiative.
The government, as follows from the official conclusion, has «substantial comments» about these proposals. They boil down to what was repeatedly repeated earlier in the opinions on other bills of this kind: a pension is a compensation to citizens of the earnings … that they received before the establishment of compulsory insurance coverage, ”and based on the amount of insurance premiums not taken into account when calculating a pension, the recalculation is already done — in the amount, the maximum of which is determined by law. Why exactly in this size and how the government treats the idea of revising it — is not said.
The government also did not give an assessment of the calculations presented in the financial and economic justification, without saying whether it considers them reasonable, overestimated or underestimated. The conclusion only states that the authors did not indicate the sources of the required funds.
Approximately the same is said in the conclusion of the government on the bill submitted to the State Duma last year by independent deputies Oksana Dmitrieva. She also proposes to equalize in terms of points accrued to the individual account of the insured, pensioners and those who have not reached retirement age: up to 10 points for everyone as much as possible, and to recalculate working pensioners based on this rule for all the time that has passed since 2015. “For working pensioners who received average and above average wages, with which insurance premiums were paid during 2015-2022, pension rights are formed from the incomplete amount of contributions paid,” says Ms. Dmitrieva. In the financial and economic justification, she estimated the additional costs for the implementation of the bill at 12.26 billion rubles per month and approximately 147 billion rubles per year — which, in her opinion, is in any case about two times less than the annual insurance premiums paid for working pensioners over the limit equivalent to three points.
It is worth remembering that in January 2023, the State Duma rejected five draft laws introduced by deputies and regional parliaments at once on the return to the payment of pensions to those working, taking into account indexation, and the question of the injustice of the current rules for the annual recalculation of pensions depending on points was also raised. The majority of the Duma then suggested that we first wait for the materials of the Accounts Chamber, which the deputies asked last fall to calculate all the financial consequences of the abolition of indexation of pensions for workers.
It's the beginning of May now. The head of the relevant Duma Committee on Labor and Social Policy, Yaroslav Nilov (LDPR), told MK that «at the moment there has not been a meeting with the Accounts Chamber on this topic, but it is planned in the near future.» As for the annual recalculation of pensions for employees, “it must be full-fledged, they cannot be discriminated against, it violates insurance principles,” the deputy believes, and he unconditionally supports the initiative of the Leningrad Region in this part.
According to the Social Fund (since January 1, it has merged the Pension Fund and the Social Insurance Fund), by the beginning of 2023, the number of working pensioners in the country has sharply decreased — by 7% at once, and amounted to 7.9 million people. A year earlier there were 8.5 million people. Of course, this can be partly explained by the increase in the retirement age and high mortality from covid and its consequences, but apparently, the unscheduled indexation of pensions for the unemployed by 10%, which happened in June, also played a role: it widened the gap in the average pension between the employed and the unemployed from about 3,500 rubles a month to about 5,000 rubles a month.
Meanwhile, on April 15, 2023, the deadline for fulfilling the president’s instruction that he gave the government expired, namely “to consider the issue of indexing insurance pensions working disabled people. Nothing is known about the results of this consideration. A draft law on this subject, prepared by Oleg Smolin (KPRF), has been waiting for the Cabinet of Ministers’ decision for several months now: in a conversation with MK, Mr. Smolin said that, according to his information, the Ministry of Labor had prepared a draft negative opinion, but the government “so far has taken pause and wait. The deputy recalled that working disabled people receive pensions before they reach retirement age, and their salaries are usually low, and, remaining to work, they lose up to half of their salary due to the abolition of indexation.