Early retirement is a concept that has been reintroduced in the new Pension and Disability Insurance Act (in force since 2013). It was not known to the previous ZPIZ-1, but was regulated in Pension and Disability Insurance Act from 1992 (ZPIZ-1992). Workers must retire early for reasons beyond their sphere of decision-making (for example dismissals, health problems, legislation) or they voluntarily retire early because, for example, they want to enjoy retirement as long as possible, although pension is lower due to non-fulfillment of the conditions for old age retirement. The master thesis is dedicated to the treatment of the latter. In order to obtain the right to early retirement, the new Act determined the condition of age and pension qualifying period without purchase, which makes voluntarily paid contributions to compulsory pension insurance scheme (which constitute purchase) insufficient to obtain this right. The Constitutional Court assessed whether, in the case of this provision existed a breach of constitutional rights of insured persons who voluntarily paid contributions to compulsory pension insurance scheme according to ZPIZ-1 and can now not retire under the terms of this Act. The Court stated that there was no violation of constitutional rights. Nevertheless the statistics show that the number of so called ¨voluntarily insured persons¨ decreased after ZPIZ-2 came into force. To some extent the legislator has thus succeeded in meeting the goal of achieveng the retention of the ratio between contributions to the pension fund and payouts from it and in the future individuals who wish to retire early will most likely have to use other approaches such as, for example, supplementary pension insurance, which is widely established abroad.
|