Midlife retirement crisis

The Constitutional Court is considering a case of discrimination against those over 40

This is not the first time that shortcomings in legislation on pensions have become the subject of proceedings in the Constitutional Court. On Thursday, judges began considering complaints against those provisions of the law that relate to the funded part of labor pensions . Let us explain: according to amendments to the Tax Code and the Law “On Compulsory Pension Insurance” adopted in 2004, citizens born before 1967 can only count on the basic part of the pension. If a future pensioner was born after 1967, he can also count on the funded part (i.e., that portion of the pension that is made up of insurance contributions paid by the employer).

The complainants - Muscovites Konstantin Katanyan, Lidiya Revenko and Dmitry Slobodyanyuk - fell into the first category. Initially, they did not challenge their status and ensure that the employer pays insurance premiums for them, but made an attempt to increase the size of their future pension using funds from their own pockets. “The applicants turned to the Russian Pension Fund with a request to clarify whether it is possible to replenish their funded part of their labor pension on a voluntary basis,” the press service of the Constitutional Court explained to journalists. “The pension fund responded that current legislation does not provide for such a possibility.” Then Katanyan, Revenko and Slobodyanyuk tried to appeal the decision of the Pension Fund in the Presnensky Court of Moscow, but the claims were rejected, citing the same provisions of the pension legislation.

The applicants’ lawyer, Inna Tikhomirova, insists that the law is discriminatory, since, contrary to the principle of equality of citizens prescribed in the Constitution, it divides them into two categories: “young” who are allowed to increase their pensions, and “middle-aged people” who are deprived of this opportunity.

An expert in this case, chief researcher at the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law under the Government of the Russian Federation, Yuri Zakharov, cited Rosstat data, according to which 29 million Russians were excluded from the funded system. “The state offended me not only materially, but also morally,” Ms. Revenko noted in her speech.

The defendants, as usual, were representatives of the legislative and executive authorities - the head of the legal department of the State Duma apparatus, David Tsabria, the presidential envoy to the Constitutional Court, Mikhail Krotov, and the representative of the Federation Council, Elena Vinogradova. Defending the correctness of the contested norms, they emphasized that the legislator did not at all seek to infringe on the rights of “middle-aged citizens.” On the contrary, the law comes to the protection of those who are already over 40 and who, due to their age, simply do not have time to accumulate a sufficient amount, and transfers their contributions to the insurance part of pensions. Mr. Tsabria added that “the savings system for this age group never worked.”

The defendants also reminded the applicants that the law does not prohibit people who want to influence the amount of their old-age benefits from applying to non-state pension funds. To be fair, it should be noted: the state representatives themselves stated that in this case the private pension insurance system turns out to be more effective than the state one .

Mikhail MOSHKIN