If it were not for the collection of contributions and the existence of ear-marked revenue streams, there could be no social security. Although several different organizational models exist (collection by the institution itself, by a specialist agency or through taxes), there is much overlap between them.
The Technical Commission on Contribution Collection and Compliance is responsible for everything related to social security funding sources and their safeguarding. While the Technical Commission on Contribution Collection and Compliance essentially does not cover the tax-funded organizational model, it does deal with issues likely to be of interest beyond the scope of contribution collection. These include the macroeconomic, technical and operational questions arising from these issues.
As a commission specializing in collection, it ensures that such matters are included in ISSA policy documents on general subjects such as communication, extension of coverage, governance and service quality, which may have particularities when it comes to the field of collection. It thus plays a role in drawing up ISSA Guidelines by approaching them from this angle.
This commission is, notably, charged with coordinating and monitoring the ISSA Guidelines on Contribution Collection and Compliance and the ISSA Guidelines on Error, Evasion and Fraud in Social Security Systems. As such, it ensures regular exchanges with other technical commissions on aspects of particular relevance to them, including with the Technical Commission on Information and Communication Technology, the Technical Commission on Organization, Management and Innovation and the Technical Commission on Medical Care and Sickness Insurance.
In addition, the Technical Commission on Contribution Collection and Compliance regularly supplies the ISSA with good practices that may be of interest to its member institutions. These may concern, for example, the regular and proactive provision of information to insured persons on the rights they have accumulated during their working life; the use of innovative solutions to protect these rights; cash-flow management within institutions; the extension of coverage to self-employed workers or people working in very small businesses; or the implementation of revised risk-management techniques or those for making checks more targeted.
The technical commission also coordinates the thinking of social security institutions responsible for contribution collection and fraud around topical issues, proposing apposite policies on the basis of concrete knowledge or field surveys whose responses are subject to analysis by all members. Once these responses have been validated by the commission, they are compiled in a technical report that is then published under the commission’s name at the World Social Security Forum. It is in this way that this commission has, for example, been able to produce reports on topics such as techniques for fighting fraud or methods for collecting contributions from self-employed workers (or those declared as such) who work through service platforms.