Widow’s pensions / Retrospective cuts shock – Who has to pay back up to 6 years of benefits

The title “Choose which pension you want to lose” can be the “favorable” scenario that the Ministry of Labor is considering for the upcoming cuts in widow’s pensions, which will be implemented, as everything shows, from next September. But apart from this there is also a worse scenario, i.e. not only that the beneficiary loses the widow’s pension completely, but also finds himself in debt to the EFKA and is called to pay the pensions of not only one three-year period, but two three-year periods as unduly paid!

According to the latest scenarios circulated by the Ministry of Labour, in July another “broom” insurance bill is expected to be submitted to the Parliament and will have as its front the removal of obstacles to the work of pensioners with disabilities, while giving a definitive end pending cuts to private sector widow’s pensions.

As is known, at the end of the three years and if the beneficiary receives his own pension or works, the widow’s pension is reduced by 50% and drops to 35% of the pension that the deceased received. The cut is estimated to concern more than 60,000 beneficiaries of widow’s pensions after 2016 to whom the provision has not been applied and this pending closes almost 7 years.

If the cuts start next September, beneficiaries of widow’s pensions, the vast majority of whom are women, will be asked to return two to three years’ worth of pensions to EFKA.

Two scenarios

In this case, if there is no other intervention, the widows will not only lose the pension they receive from the deceased husband if they maintain their own pension from work or work, but return after six years the money they received as beneficiaries. Apart from the refunds, which are the big problem, the ministry is looking at the possibility that the insured can choose whether the cut will affect the widow’s pension or the pension he receives from his work so that the loss affects the smaller pension.

The second thing that is being considered is that the cut only concerns the part of the national pension and not the compensatory one. Except that there is also the category of very low widow’s pensions, where if the national pension is completely cut, the compensation can be from zero to a crumb! This possibility is quite likely to concern tens of thousands of widow’s pension beneficiaries. And this as the national pension has been established at 426.58 euros, while the interpretive circular of the Deputy Minister of Social Security Panagiotis Tsakloglou is clear: “When an insured person is entitled to more than one pension (old age, disability or death) he is granted a national pension” and in the second it is limited to the compensatory and only part of his pension.