Russia to create single social security management system
The Russian Federation has announced its intention to create a single data management system bringing together all of its social security spending, with the aim of improving efficiency and combating fraud.
Nikolai Yelistratov, Chairman of The Pension Fund of the Russian Federation (PFR), said that the new system – named EGISSO – will hold all the information held by government on the social support received by each Russian citizen.
There are currently more than 130 different social security systems in Russia, varying between regions and covering a huge variety of situations – from the birth of a second child to participation in the Second World War. According to the Federal Treasury, social spending takes a share of the federal budget in the order of four trillion rubles ($56bn). But these systems are administered by a large number of different agencies and information systems.
“Founding EGISSO will help us to understand in which cases the federal and the local government [duplicate work], and to provide each person with the same level of support. Also, we hope to reduce the number of cheating cases, when people who don’t have any right to claim support still manage to deceive the government,” Yelistratov declared.
Under the PFR’s plan, building the EGISSO will take three years. During this time the fund is going to prepare a so-called “united classifier” of social support types and integrate information about them, and about the people who receive support, into one single database.
The governmental cost of this programme has been put at around 2.5bn rubles ($35m) – a tiny figure by comparison with similar projects elsewhere, and one that may not be realistic. By pessimistic forecasts, the cumulative savings across different budgets produced by implementing EGISSO is expected to reach 3%. Under an optimistic forecast, as much as 10% could be saved by using the single database, as the system would make it easier to detect fraud.
About Anastasya Manuilova
Anastasya Manuilova is an economics reporter for the Russian newspaper Kommersant, covering welfare, labour markets, demographic change and the pharmaceutical industry
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