When we look into history, we learn that pension insurance in the Czechoslovak Republic was regulated by Act No 26 of 1929. It replaced the original Pension Act of December 1906 and its Austrian and Czechoslovak amendments. The provider of pension insurance according to this act was the General Pension Institute. It carried out pension insurance, which was one of the branches of social insurance. Even then, the notion "social insurance" represented a set of public economic regulations, built on the principle of balance between income and expenditure. Their task was to ensure the awarding of cash benefits to economically weaker persons, usually with the help of the State. The provider of invalidity, sickness and old-age insurance during the first Czechoslovak Republic was the Central Social Insurance Agency in Prague.
Page title
History of the Social Insurance Agency
Years 1929 - 1939
Years 1939 - 1945
After the establishment of the Slovak Republic in March 1939, the government established the Central Social Insurance Agency in Bratislava by decree in April 1939, which was statutory and provided pension and sickness insurance. Simultaneously with it, in 1938-1939, the State Office for the Insurance of Workers in Slovakia operated, which provided insurance exclusively for this working class. By government order from November 1940, the Central Social Insurance Agency in Bratislava was transformed into the Workers' Social Insurance Agency. In its framework, insurance unions were created according to individual branches of insurance, which, except to their tasks related to insurance, also performed certain tasks common to all unions. The unification of workers' social insurance was a significant step in the field of social policy at that time. Nevertheless, in this period, social security only applied to a limited circle of people.
Years 1945 - 1951
In 1945, the Workers' Social Insurance Agency was transformed into the Central Social Insurance Agency. After three years of activity, it changed to the National Insurance Agency, which also took over the financing of health care and operated until 1951.
Years 1951 - 1989
After the advent and consolidation of the communist regime, social policy, an important part of which is social security, began to affect practically every citizen. Developments at the time created the conditions for expanding the number of social policy activities. Since 1952, funds for the implementation of social security have been concentrated in the Slovak Pension Insurance Office. In accordance with the communist doctrine, the assets of the National Insurance Agency, to which the insured persons contributing to its funds had the natural right of ownership, were nationalized. There was a boom in State paternalism in the social sphere, when many forms of care were taken over by state authorities instead of families. Thus, various social activities have largely shifted from the family to state social policy and its subsystems - social security, social care, social activities of state enterprises and cooperatives, as well as social activities of the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH) and interest organizations. Since 1960, the Pension Administration in Bratislava has taken over the performance of pension insurance. There was a significant organizational change in the performance of social security in 1976. According to Act no. 121/1975 Coll. on Social Security, the performance of pension insurance was separated organizationally (it came under the purview of the newly created Pension Security Office) and the performance of sickness insurance was transferred to the ROH authorities, the Slovak Sickness Insurance Administration, regional and district sickness insurance administrations, as their special purpose institutions.
Years 1990 – 2003
After November 17, 1989, social security underwent two fundamental changes, which primarily affected its organizational side. The first was the merger of the performance of pension security and sickness insurance from January 1, 1991 into one state institution. The Slovak Sickness Insurance Administration, the social affairs departments of the national committees and the Pension Security Office merged into the Slovak Social Security Administration, which operated until the end of 1992. In 1993, as part of the transformation of the social sphere, the institutional arrangement was changed and a public institution was created - the National Insurance Agency. The change expressed two new basic facts:
- It merged the performance of health insurance, sickness insurance and pension security in one institution, formed by three separate funds.
- Following the new tax system, it separated the financing of the National Insurance Agency from the state budget and created three separate funds, which were to be formed from insurance premiums and partly from State contributions.
Over time, the connection of health insurance with social security funds proved to be dysfunctional due to their principled difference, which caused problems in the effective organizational structure of the National Insurance Agency. This was the reason for their division and the establishment of a plural system of health insurance companies and the Social Insurance Agency. The Social Insurance Agency began its activity as a statutory institution in 1995. When the State entrusted the Social Insurance Agency with the performance of sickness insurance and pension security, it equipped it with the necessary competences and provided it with relative independence from ministries and the Slovak government. From April 1, 2002, the Social Insurance Agency took over from Slovak Insurance Office the performance of insurance as well as insurance of employer's liability for damage caused by accidents at work and occupational diseases.
Year 2004 to the present
The year 2004 is a landmark in the history of the Social Insurance Agency, which affected the entire society. By adopting the Act on Social Insurance No. 461/2003 Coll. the National Council of the SR enabled the launch of the long-awaited pension reform. This was the only way to start reforming the social security system, which as of January 1, 2004 was transformed into social insurance in the true sense of the word, with the executor being Social Insurance Agency.
There are many changes brought about by the Act on Social Insurance. In sickness insurance, pension insurance, accident insurance. The competence of the Social Insurance Agency was expanded to include unemployment insurance and guarantee insurance, the agenda of which the insurance agency took over from the National Labour Office. There are also changes in the area of insurance premium collection and medical assessment activities. From January 1, 2005, new obligations related to the implementation of old-age pension savings were added to the Social Insurance Agency, i.e. the second pillar of the pension reform. In the framework of old-age pension savings, the insurance agency primarily collects contributions, forwards them to pension management companies and registers old-age pension savings contracts.