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40% of payouts from ANSes don't arrive in the pockets of pensioners
Clarin
August 19, 2010

By Ismael Bermudez
While the pro-government and opposition blocks debate if ANSeS has the resources or not to pay 82% scalable pensions and other changes voted on yesterday in the House, the reality is that more than 40% of payments that the organization makes are not within the pension system.

Those payments total some 50 billion pesos a year. This sum is more than the 30 billion per year that would be squeezed from the changes being debated last night among the legislators, according to government calculations.

Even so, still if the 82% regime would be paid out starting today, the country would not face a risk of falling into default in the next three months, as President Cristina Kirchner warned yesterday. And this is because ANSeS counts on a surplus of some 10 billion pesos that it would reach to pay an eventual increase in the minimum entitlement for the rest of 2010.

Towards the future a discussion of the National Budget is required that would generate, through new sources of revenue and redistribution of spending, genuine financing to all that ANSeS pays today. This would have to be faced up to basically by the Ministry of Social Development with funds coming from General Revenue.

Today, ANSeS is "overcharged" because its current revenues pay for:

More than 910,000 non-contributing pensioners, which adds up to 10 billion pesos a year.

The deficit is covered for military, policy and security coffers.

Subsidies for the program of Production Reproduction (Repro) to business in crisis that suspend personnel.

The 2.3 million so-called pensions "by moratorium", which is said of people with incomplete contributions or totally without contributions: that is 27 million pesos.

Of the interest of the Guarantee Fund of ANSeS 8.3 billion comes out to pay the 4 million in the new Universal Benefit for Children. And also the program for computers to high schools and students.

In the case of the Benefit for Children the "overcharge" on ANSeS is more significant: it absorbed the funds for social plans, like the Families Plan, whose budget credit for that reason this year was not used at all, generating a "savings" for the National Treasury.

Thus, if all those costs and benefits were to be financed apart which was not discussed or evaluated when they were approved they could even be improved or added to. And ANSeS could pay the 82% mobile pension, not only for the minimum entitlement but for all pensioners.

The government argues that those loans correspond to ANSeS because it received part of tax revenue and 15% of Federal Co-participation (federal-provincial revenue sharing). But those funds as was decided in the 1990s compensate from the national pension regime the imbalances in the transferred provincial pension coffers that in 2010 will round out to 7 billion pesos. And it also finances revenues that were not received into the public system for the reduction of some 10 points of the matching patron contributions.

Thus, in practice, ANSeS pays very low entitlements and is accumulating an enormous amount of litigation some 400,000 lawsuits because it jointly finances social spending, whose legitimacy no sector debates. But it definitely pays very low entitlements: today the average pension rounds out to 36% of the medium formal salary in the economy.

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