Annex 4.4 Interview with SSS Main office representative 1. Current social security situation in the country. - There are only 3 types of membership in SSS. Employed, Self-Employed, and Voluntary. There is no disaggregated data on whether these members belong in inherently vulnerable sectors. Members belonging in the informal sector usually are covered under Self-Employed. - The major challenge in the data is that even the PSA has no concrete/updated data on how many people are in the informal sector. If the PSA would have the data, then the SSS can do the targeting of these people for coverage. - Registered members are around 38M but the actively paying is only 16M. This is mostly due to lack of security of tenure for most jobs in the country. - The agency provides annual reports to the office of the President, Congress, and Senate. Included in this report is the financial statement of the agency; its revenue streams including member collection, investment income, operating expenses, and benefit payments. - In 2016 collection was 144B, in 2017 159B, in 2018 180B. In 2016 before the approval of 1000 increase in pensions, benefit payments were 131B, in 2017 it was 169B, in 2018 it was 181B. In terms of collection, it is slowly catching up with the benefit payments, but it is still behind overall and there was a big increase due to the 1000 additional pension. - Based on current actuarial data, SSS currently pays for pension an average of 20 years. A minimum paying member (Php 110 per month) needs only 120 months of payment to qualify for the pension. With the Php 1,000 increase in pension payments, (now Php 2,200) the member has claimed back his payments with only 6 monthly pensions. The agency must find ways to fund the rest of the pension payments (19 years and 6 months) thru better collection and investments and balancing operating expenses and benefit payments. - There is difficulty in getting Filipinos to save for the future. The concept of social insurance is hard to inculcate as most of Filipinos manage finances only for day-to-day. The SSS concept of saving for the future and being a financial contingency is still farfetched to most people. - There is data on how many women among employed, self-employed/voluntary members. Data on indigenous peoples. (follow-up) - As of 2018 there are 108,588 members of 1,445 AlkanSSSya program accredited partners. Collection is at 797.54M 2. How does the agency contribute to the Social Protection component of the Philippine Development Plan? - They usually target cooperatives in order to increase the range and number of coverages. These cooperatives become partners and remittance channels for the members. In so far as they have partnered with cooperatives, there has yet to be an Indigenous People cooperative partner. - Each peso contributed to SSS has a return. Short term benefits are sickness, maternity, partial disability, funeral, and the unemployment. Long term benefits are pensions, and survivor pensions. Per actuarial studies, each peso now has a benefit return from Php 5 all the way to Php 16. It also shows that those who are paying less are getting more. 66