The pension-related functions of the Social Insurance Agency will be taken over by a new organization in January 2010. The organization will have to solve problems related to pension records. The government should take utmost care to ensure that the new body can fulfill its tasks.
The SIA's pension-related sections have about 20,900 workers. The new body will start with 17,830 workers, who will no longer be public servants. Up to 10,880 will have permanent employment, while the rest will lose their jobs after a certain period.
The new body's basic plan does not consider the problem of some 50 million hard-to-identify premium payment records because this problem is supposed to have been solved by the time the new body starts. In addition, it is estimated that about 5.6 million computer records related to pensions for company-employed workers (kosei nenkin) contain erroneous information different from original paper registers. If kokumin nenkin pensions, mainly for self-employed people, are included, there are about 850 million original paper records, including about 400 million related to kosei nenkin.