The Retirement Orientation Council enters a zone of turbulence | EUROtoday

A powerful wind warning is issued for the Retirement Orientation Council (COR). Within this physique, chargeable for enlightening public decision-makers and the inhabitants, disagreements have simply emerged between its president, the economist Gilbert Cet, and a number of other members representing unions. The dispute considerations a proposed new methodology for setting up the subsequent annual report, the publication of which is scheduled for June. This change of method, which should be offered on Thursday April 4, would flip its again on the ideas of independence and pluralism, on which the COR is predicated, and would goal to arrange the bottom for a painful reform, in keeping with a number of worker organizations.

The COR is a spot of experience by which personalities with various profiles sit: parliamentarians, senior civil servants, researchers, employer and union activists, and many others. Once a 12 months, it submits a long-awaited report, the topic of in depth feedback, as a result of one in all its targets is to evaluate the monetary scenario of our pay-as-you-go system for the subsequent half-century.

The high quality of this doc is unanimously praised, however with caveats, which have been heard with rising insistence in recent times, within the mouths of sure specialists, political figures and leaders of employers' actions. In their eyes, the COR reviews can be too detailed and would permit all of the speeches to be made on the true state of the accounts of our pension plans: “There is no danger in the house” or, conversely, “the system is going straight into the wall”.

Dissimilar outcomes

Such criticism is because of the truth that one of many missions of this establishment is to supply a considerable amount of information, to governments and residents, with out making a advice – as a result of this isn’t a part of its remit. Driven by the need to supply a whole lot of data, the COR constructed, till very not too long ago, monetary projections primarily based on three accounting conventions, resulting in dissimilar outcomes on the extent of the deficits and the time wanted to fill them. . To simplify studying, it was determined to maintain a single conference within the physique of the report, and to maintain one other within the appendices.

But these selections haven’t extinguished all of the reservations. Especially since Pierre-Louis Bras, on the time when he chaired the COR, was criticized by the chief for fueling confusion by asserting that “retirement expenses are not slipping”. His declaration, made at the start of 2023, irritated the federal government, on the time of finishing up a reform justified by the need to protect the budgetary balances of our pay-as-you-go system. A number of months later, Mr. Bras was fired and Mr. Cet changed him, at the start of November 2023.

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