About 350,000 Greek retirees have been waiting in lines anywhere from six months to four years, looking for someone in the Greek public sector to inform them on when they will start receiving their pension.
The debt to unpaid pensioners is estimated at 3-4 billion euros. Thus, the most bona fide pensioner is finding it difficult to believe that he will benefit from Greece’s surplus which is most likely to be used to compensate the Greek public sector’s debts to third parties.
Note that representatives of troika caustically doubted the ability of Greece to distribute the primary surplus since there are thousands of pending decisions concerning retirement. Troika’s representatives also highlighted that despite the new insurance scheme, Greek pensioners increased by 600,000 over the past six years.
First in delays seems to be the Social Insurance Institute (IKA) with 200,000 pending pensions. If the insurance is sequential, the waiting could be more than two years.
The Federation of Employees in IKA claim that the delays should be attributed to the lack of staff since each employees of Athens’ branch is processing about 5,000 cases of retirement.
The Greek Social Insurance Organisation of Freelance Professionals (OAEE) has more than 21,000 pending cases while in the public sector the same number comes up to 30,000 cases.
According to unionists, the waiting time will extend to seven years if the Greek state does not hire additional staff.
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