Year-end bonuses paid to retired government employees should be rationalized with more rigorous standards for calculating their needs, the New Power Party’s (NPP) legislative caucus said yesterday.
“The only reason for the monthly income cut-off being NT$25,000 this year seems be because that is where the cut-off was last year,” NPP Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) said at a news conference. “The income cut-off for receiving government benefits as a low-income household is much lower.”
Each local government sets its own cut-off for determining low-income households, with Taipei’s NT$22,207 cut-off for middle-low income households being the highest in the nation.
The payments are similar to the annual bonuses given to active civil servants and were once granted to all pensioners, only to be cut back in 2012 with the introduction of income cut-offs.
“These payments have no legal foundation beyond a previous executive order giving retired employees money on top of their legally defined pensions,” said NPP Legislator Kawlo Iyun Pacidal, criticizing the bonuses for lacking clear performance standards.
“If our objective is to take care of retired government workers, this should not be done through bonuses. Instead, we should accomplish it by either reforming pensions, or else through the welfare system,” she said.
“Reality is that the income cut-off itself is fake because it only includes the monthly pension payment, not income from preferential interest-rate retirement accounts,” NPP caucus convener Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明) said.
Retirees whose pensions were accrued prior to 1995 are eligible to deposit some funds in accounts which have interest rates of up to 18 percent.
Huang also criticized the system for failing to take into account the difference between regular monthly pension payments and the “half-pensions” received by officials who choose to receive a lump sum upon retirement.
Pensioners who took their lump sum payments and invested them into preferential savings accounts could earn monthly incomes of more than NT$60,000 including interest payments while still receiving “half-pension” payments below the threshold to receive year-end bonuses, he said, calling for this to be taken into consideration in determining eligibility as they already are for the triannual holiday bonuses received by retirees.
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