The Social Insurance Agency on Dec. 17 started sending notices about pension premium payment records to people with the expectation that the notices would help them remember details of past pension premium payments and partially solve the problem of 50.95 million hard-to-identify payment records.
But the notices were so hard to understand that the agency had to send revised notices. This has been criticized as another example of shoddy SIA work. SIA officials should develop the habit of carefully considering whether their actions really help people.
The SIA started sending the notices in the belief that it was highly likely that about 11 million of the 50.95 million records could be identified. The first batch of notices were sent to about 480,000 people. Only about 160,000 replied, and only some 20,000 of those asked for corrections, thinking that their records might be among the 11 million. The poor response dashed SIA's hope.