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Five weeks after the relevant bill passed through parliament, the Department of Social Insurance announced that it is now accepting applications from companies and self-employed individuals to repay their social insurance dues in installments.
The scheme is open up to the end of November, after which all applications will be rejected.
According to the new plan, overdue contributions, including those sent or tried in court, may be repayable in 54 equal installments as the government tries to collect on the EUR 288 mln outstanding payments. In just two days, the Department has already been inundated with calls for information, and the number is expected to grow.
To the relief of many small and medium-sized enterprises, that are still struggling to rebuild their finances in the absence of proper funding from banks, DSI officials have said that they will be flexible with payments, as long proper justification can be provided for the delay, but skipping payments is not allowed. Instead, the missing or delayed new payments will be divided among the remaining months and adjusted to a new installment.
At the same time, early repayments, that include contributions to the Social Insurance Fund, the Redundancy Fund, Holidays Fund and payments to the Human Resources Training Agency, will be subject to discounts at the end of the plan.
The long-awaited scheme, affecting more than half of self employed professionals, has taken too long to implement, but some DSI officials have said that the problem lied with parliament where MPs dragged their feet and hoped to gain voters in the run-up to last May’s elections. On the other hand, this sort of relief, albeit small, is the first indication that the current government is trying to help the self-employed and the SMEs, all of whom are facing a dilemma of continuing their work or declaring bankruptcy, with the hope that the latter option will buy them some time of a few years in court until they resume payments. But then the higher interest fees will kick in, in which case, there is not much of a choice.
If the government, after three years in office, starts to provide SMEs and the self-employed with other relief programmes (VAT, local taxes, etc.) then there is hope that thousands businesses will have a chance to recover. Only then will the economy pick up.
