Economic experts, academics, lawyers, members of civil society are the ones who make up the new Interdisciplinary Commission for the Preparation of a reform project of the IVM Pension System, which must be delivered to the Government in May 2023. The formation of said commission was announced on January 10 by President Guillermo Lasso.
The members of the commission are led by Augusto de la Torre, who will lead the work and act as coordinator. De la Torre was chief director of the World Bank for Latin America and has worked on a diagnosis of Social Security in Ecuador. There is also Eduardo Carmigniani Valencia, Doménica Cobo Flandoli, Andrea García Angulo, Andrés Hidalgo Cevallos, Pablo Lucio-Paredes, Karla Morales and Segundo Vilema.
In accordance with the commitments acquired by the members of this commission, they must deliver a reform focused exclusively on the Disability, Old Age and Death Insurance (IVM), administered by the Ecuadorian Institute of Social Security (IESS), as well as other programs intrinsically related to the IVM, such as unemployment insurance, unemployment fund, reserve fund, complementary insurance and the employer retirement system.
The conclusions, recommendations and proposals for legal reform that the commission draws up will not be binding.
In any case, the idea is to generate a national discussion on the reform that the pension system requires, taking into account the greatest number of appreciations and suggestions from public entities and civil society; and, on the other hand, the design of a legal reform proposal with technical support.
“The legal reform proposal that the commission presents will aim to solve the problems of sustainability and financial and fiscal viability of the pension system,” says the commitment document. In addition, it will take into account the principles of efficiency, solidarity, obligation, universality, subsidiarity, sufficiency and social equity; as well as the scarcity of fiscal resources and “the challenges that the system faces as a consequence of the change in the demographic profile of the population, with greater life expectancy.”
The commission may count on the technical assistance of experts from multilateral entities, including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the International Labor Organization (ILO), under the terms in which these entities provide these services.
Meanwhile, the current director of the IESS, Diego Salgado, explained in an interview in Teleamazon that technical roundtables have been held for four months, led by the president of the IESS, Alfredo Ortega, to analyze various scenarios for the sustainability of Social Security.
Among these scenarios is, for example, the issue of retirement age. It is that life expectancy when the law was made was 70 years, now it is 80 years. Salgado said that at the moment the IESS has an elderly population ready to retire and that in ten years the number of pensioners for retirement has increased by 7.9%, while the contributors are not enough. “We have 5.5 contributors for each retiree, when there should be 8 contributors,” he said.
The percentage of contribution of each one of the affiliates is also in the analysis. On this issue, he reflected that there are many services that were expanded during the populist government and that are not financed.
So, the possible solutions have to do with age, contribution percentages or even mixed scenarios. However, he clarified that there is no decision made.
For Salgado, it is a step forward that decree 571 of last October was issued, in which the regulation for the election of the delegates of workers and employers to the IESS was reformed. After a series of setbacks, this Council now has three members: for the employers, María de los Ángeles Rodríguez; for the workers, Richard Gómez; and, for the executive, Alfredo Ortega.
The issue of the possession of Gómez in the Council is, at the moment, a focus of controversy. The representatives of the union centrals do not recognize it. According to Fernando Ibarra, from Cedeclat, they have just appealed a decision by a judge from Machachi and expect the Provincial Court to rule in the coming days. They also hope that the Superintendency of Banks will deny Gómez’s qualification, since they say that he does not meet the minimum requirements.
On the other hand, for January 14 a mobilization is being prepared by the National Federation of Peasant Social Security (Feunassc) against what has happened in the Board of Directors. Ibarra said that, in addition, they are opposed to the formed Commission, which he described as neoliberal. He said that surely what will be proposed is an increase in years for retirement or an increase in contributions. For Ibarra, these are not the solutions, because if the State paid everything owed to the IESS, it would not be in financial trouble.
Meanwhile, Salgado pointed out that the IESS is currently in good health, and that is why payments to affiliates are being honored. However, he explained that the IESS law, which dates back to 2001, requires reform. This has had 31 declarations of unconstitutionality by the Constitutional Court, 38 reforms by the legislature and has no regulations. In this sense, it is necessary to reform the IESS regulations. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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