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.

Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) of Oman has strived to proceed with the strategic core of social security culture and responsibility. PASI aims to improve the level of social security implementation for individuals, families and the society.

PASI seeks to improve the authority’s applied processes, and to provide sustainable services that meet the requirements of customers with high quality and efficiency, and in line with the objectives for which the authority was established.

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) of Oman strives to develop its collection mechanisms and provide a variety of methods and means for individuals and companies to pay the monthly contributions easily and on time. It keeps studying the mechanisms available and does researches and meetings with its stakeholders to come up with new mechanisms that help PASI to collect the monthly contributions in an effective way.

Through this project, the Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI), in cooperation with academic and educational institutions in Oman, has sought to enrich the knowledge of social protection and its importance for children, students, job seekers and parents.

The purpose of the project is to ensure the risk and return of the investment portfolio of the Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) of Oman meets its target to maintain the sustainability of the scheme in order to provide the required benefits to pensioners.

The PASI risk scoring methodology is as follows:

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) since its inception has promoted the strategic core value of social security culture and responsibility. The PASI aims to raise the social security awareness level and its importance to individuals, family and the society. There are communities with high levels of social welfare supported by the government.

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) seeks to achieve its vision and mission by providing high quality services to the insured persons and the employers with speed and accuracy at the lowest costs. In line with rapid developments in the information technology field, the smart inspection system (SIS) was introduced. Work and occupational diseases are linked to several auxiliary systems developed in conjunction with the SIS which consists of several systems such as:

The Civil Service Employee Pension Fund (CSEPF) vision is to achieve excellence and leadership in providing the best services to Omani nationals employed in the government sector covered by the Law of Pensions and End of Service Benefits, and investing its fund using the latest technologies. Therefore, CSEPF decided to implement online services (e-Services) through its portal, which is integrated with the existing core systems.

Technology is rapidly transforming the way that the financial sector is operating, and the management and delivery of pensions is not an exception. Therefore, the Civil Service Employees Pension Fund (CSEPF) of Oman decided to adopt electronic payments (e-payments) solution through local banks’ Business-to-Business (B2B) solution to help speed up the payment cycle and boost security and compliance.

The Civil Service Employees Pension Fund (CSEPF) is a service organization providing social protection to Omani citizens working in the public sector in Oman, the Gulf Cooperation Countries and elsewhere.

CSEPF established its Risk Department, which led to:

Civil Service Employees Pension Fund (CSEPF) is a service organization providing social protection to Omani citizens working in the public sector in Oman, the Gulf Cooperation Countries and elsewhere.

One of the core objectives of the Fund is to manage and invest the Fund’s assets to maintain their real value.

Recently, CSEPF reengineered its investment process, which led to:

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) is a long term investor with a positive cash-flow over the near- and long-term horizon. Hence, the PASI board believes that the priority for the next five to ten years should be to grow the investment portfolio in order to reduce the reliance on future contributions to pay for benefits. PASI assets were experiencing faster growth in 2014 due to increased cash inflows from monthly contributions of an additional 3 per cent.

The Civil Service Employees Pension Fund (CSEPF), Oman decided to create a Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) site to safeguard CSEPF business from all sorts of threats and crises. CSEPF considered all the criteria applicable for a business continuity site, which includes location, data centre infrastructure, communication infrastructure, workspace and accessibility, and the use of virtual machines (VM) and NetApp – Storage Brand – replication technology to guarantee the availability of the data.

Unified communication is an increasingly important investment for organizations looking to improve productivity and responsiveness while reducing their IT costs. The convergence of voice, video, and data communications around a shared IP-based infrastructure - allowing users to easily make a call, send a message, or join an audio or video conference - is bringing benefits to businesses of every size, industry, and geography.

As a first attempt, the Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) prepared and adopted the first phase of its strategic plan to cover the period 2011-2015. In the final stage of strategic planning we took into account the principles of good governance in general and benchmarking with best practices from all over the world.

The Civil Service Employees Pension Fund (CSEPF) of Oman decided to upgrade and enhance its core pension information system (PIS) to integrate and connect with systems of other government entities. The main issues addressed by this integration are:

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) began its journey into strategic planning in 2008. Since then, the PASI has been searching for a systematic methodology to integrate strategic planning with performance management to align all operations into this vision so that all employees would work in the right direction with focus on the intended strategic results. To achieve this goal, the PASI has implemented the balanced scorecard (BSC) methodology as a tool for the integration of strategic planning with performance management.

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) was facing network performance issues on remote sites, so we looked at developing a comprehensive approach of WAN optimization and branch office consolidation. Certain applications require very low latency for break free communication e.g. Voice over IP, FileNet, office automation.

Improving data accuracy and simplifying the process of registration for employers and insured persons are always taken into consideration by the Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI). Previously, PASI was completely dependent on the information submitted by employers for new registrations or for updating employee-related information related, with no assurance of the accuracy of the information.

In order to achieve good corporate governance, the Risk Management Department developed an excel model for Risk Rating and Grading of the PASI investment portfolio for more effective risk management:
 

1. Design Risk Measurement Models:

Data is collected from PASI investments on a monthly basis to calculate the Yearly Volatility and Return.
 

2. Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

Calculation of Beta, Expected Return and Drift Rate.
 

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) launched a project aimed at providing specialized offices to receive the insured persons who wish to get insurance advice. Well-trained staff will carry out the functions of the service under the following main categories: early retirement and cases of lump sum requests on grounds of dedication to family on a full-time basis.

The Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) aims to manage the operations that identifies the potential threats on the Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) of Oman. Considering the core operations in relation to assets, people and operations, there must be plans to build flexible ways to protect the interests of the main stakeholders and the reputation of the Authority.

The project works on providing sustainable plans and updating them to enable the Authority to achieve goals related to business continuity (BC), as follows:

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) board of directors have decided to develop and implement a Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) to help provide efficient and reliable social insurance and protection services, and to achieve its objectives through:
 

The Public Authority for Social Insurance (PASI) has been responsible for developing internal policies and procedures to facilitate customers' access to the deliverables set by the Social Insurance Law.

PASI's goal is to ensure that all policies and procedures are made available to all staff and that they are written in such a way as to clearly specify the policies and procedures for any given matter.

The information technology (IT) department facilitates the integration of work between the various departments of PASI and plays a very critical role in the smooth functioning of the organization. For the IT department to fulfill this role, the IT infrastructure should also be up to the mark and be of the latest standards in terms of the products available and operations.

PASI benefits from the more secure employer/employee registration procedures by using the mutual database, resulting in:

1. reduced paper-work, faster procedures and a reduction in errors;
2. clients only submit data once (instead of for both PASI and the Ministry of Manpower);
3. guaranteed payment of the monthly contributions due within the time limits;
4. reduced costs for PASI and a reduction of approximately 40 per cent in the number of clients attending PASI's offices.

CSEPF sought to simplify the procedure by developing cooperation with the Civil Register of deaths in Oman to eliminate the annual follow-up, the objectives of which were essentially two: ensuring that retirees were alive and that none was receiving any other pension from the State Treasury.

In setting limits for particular types of risk, the social security fund should consider its solvency position and its risk tolerance. Limits should be set after careful consideration of corporate objectives and circumstances, and should take into account the projected outcomes of scenarios run using a range of plausible future business assumptions.

Therefore, PASI decided to provide grants within three days, and the pension within five days of the death, without waiting for the routine death notification. As a result, PASI developed a mechanism using all available means to find eligible cases, and - immediately - send a staff member to offer condolences on behalf of PASI and hand over the amount of the grants to the family. The family of the deceases is requested to apply for the death pension which PASI uses all available resources to provide within five days.

Our approach is based on the Enterprise Risk Management Framework (COSO-ERM Framework). The underlying premise of enterprise risk management is that every entity exists to provide value for its stakeholders. Value is maximized when management sets strategy and objectives to strike an optimal balance between growth and return goals and related risks, and efficiently and effectively deploys resources in pursuit of
the entity's objectives.