by Ben O. de Vera, 1 Jul 2021
About 1.5 million members of the Social Security System (SSS) stopped paying contributions last year due to the harder times wrought by the pandemic.
SSS president and chief executive Aurora Ignacio said in a press briefing on Wednesday that from 17.6 million active and regularly paying members in 2019, those who remitted their contributions fell to 16.1 million last year amid the pandemic-induced recession, which shed millions of jobs and shuttered thousands of businesses.
Ignacio said members’ contributions in 2020 declined by about P19 billion. In 2019, the SSS collected P220.4 billion in members’ contribution, up from P181 billion in 2018, due to the increase in monthly contribution rate to 12 percent two years ago.
This year, the contribution rate further rose to 13 percent.
Due to movement restrictions under the longest and the most stringent COVID-19 quarantine in the region, the SSS last year gave leeway in remittance of contributions, extending deadlines and waiving penalties for delayed payments.
Despite the decline in contributions—the main source of the pension fund’s revenues—Ignacio said investment gains allowed the SSS to sustain disbursement of pensioners and members’ benefits, although she did not say by how much investments grew last year.
In an earlier statement this week, Ignacio said that as of end-May, paying members declined to 12.3 million compared to 14.2 million a year ago due to the “economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that pushed some establishments to close their businesses and let go of their employees.”
“The latest paying member tally comprises 9.6 million employed members, accounting for 78 percent of the total. It is followed by 1.9 million voluntary paying members, 476,000 self-employed members, and 333,000 overseas Filipino worker-members,” Ignacio said.
The SSS chief was nonetheless optimistic that the gradually recovering economy would allow them to shore up contributions as well as the number of paying members this year.
The SSS’s total membership stood at 40.5 million as of end-April. INQ
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