📋 Tender Overview
At a minimum, social fund employees must register all requests and explain to the citizen both his rights and the issue of missing documents. In addition, in some cases, fund employees must request these documents themselves, the Supreme Court writes.
The Supreme Court has compiled an overview of judicial practice on pension disputes.
Forgotten years
A citizen who reached retirement age in 2017 applied for the first time to the Pension Fund (remember that now it is replaced by the Social Fund) for a pension. However, the woman did not have enough experience, and she was refused a pension; then she was denied regularly until 2020.
The fact is that her work record book , confirming the period of work from 1983 to 1993, was lost. When contacting the Pension Fund, the woman verbally asked the fund's employees to send a request to the employer for whom she worked during the specified ten-year period. However, the fund's employees, again verbally, refused to do this.
Fortunately, that employer still exists, and the citizen was able to independently obtain a certificate from him confirming the period of her work from 1983 to 1993. When the woman brought this certificate to the pension authority, she was finally assigned an old-age insurance pension .
Has the state squeezed money?
Then, in the courts, the woman tried to recover the lost pension that she had been entitled to since the age of 55. The courts refused under the pretext that she was obliged to confirm her work experience independently, and the facts of her application to the Pension Fund from 2017 to 2020 were not proven.
However, the Supreme Court did not agree with the position of the courts of general jurisdiction. First of all, the pension authority must register the citizen’s appeal, explain to him his rights, and when reviewing the documents, evaluate the available information, inform the person what is missing, and request the missing documents at the disposal of other government agencies or organizations subordinate to them.
In order to respect the pension rights of a citizen, the pension authority must conduct a comprehensive, complete and objective review of all circumstances. If the inaction of the pension fund resulted in the citizen's untimely application for the appointment of a pension, then such a citizen has the right to payment of all shortfalls. The period for applying for such additional payment is not limited. The Supreme Court ultimately sent the case back for a new trial so that the courts could more thoroughly examine all the events related to the case.
The children have grown up, but have not reached 1.5 years of age
The review also included another similar dispute: the woman did not prove that “the children have reached the age of one and a half years.” And this is very strange, since the birth certificates of the children were submitted to the fund, the woman herself was born in 1962, and applied to the Pension Fund in 2017, that is, at the age of 55. However, the fund decided not to include the period of parental leave of up to one and a half years in the pension period. The woman did not have enough experience, and she was not granted an insurance pension.
The court proceedings also yielded nothing, and the Supreme Court, once again, sent the case for a new hearing, since the courts had to find out whether the fund had at least explained to the woman what missing documents she needed to submit.
The review also included issues of early pension, disability pension, increased fixed payment to the insurance pension and a number of other disputes ( review dated 02/26/2024).
