The Greek social security institutions that were integrated into the Electronic National Social Security Fund (e-EFKA), bequeathed it, among other problems, with a plethora of issues related to “pending pensions”.

More specifically, the time required to examine the cases was too long, thus a large number of pending cases had been accumulated, and citizens’ communication with the competent services was quite difficult, while the Administration of e-EFKA faced difficulties in gathering the data for the optimum use of available resources.

In March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic broke out in Israel.

What began as a health crisis soon turned into an economic crisis, which led many workers to go on forced unpaid leave and went to the National Insurance Institute (NII) for assistance. There was a need to find creative solutions within the limits of the law and the data available to the NII, and to find workable and quick solutions that would allow the payment of unemployment benefits to unpaid workers.

The measure aims to:

• Simplify, accelerate and support the process from the moment of the submission of a claim until the payment of pension benefit.
• Alleviate the administrative burdens and costs.
• Improve transparency and a better and easier access to information.

Access to the information tool for calculating and documenting pension benefits is open, while access to electronic submission and follow up of retirement applications is via a username and password which is given by the services of IKA-ETAM.