2024-03-30 09:05:51
A strong wind warning is issued for the Retirement Orientation Council (COR). Within this body, responsible for enlightening public decision-makers and the population, disagreements have just emerged between its president, the economist Gilbert Cet, and several members representing unions. The dispute concerns a proposed new methodology for constructing the next annual report, the publication of which is scheduled for June. This change of approach, which must be presented on Thursday April 4, would turn its back on the principles of independence and pluralism, on which the COR is based, and would aim to prepare the ground for a painful reform, according to several employee organizations.
The COR is a place of expertise in which personalities with diverse profiles sit: parliamentarians, senior civil servants, researchers, employer and union activists, etc. Once a year, it submits a long-awaited report, the subject of extensive comments, because one of its goals is to assess the financial situation of our pay-as-you-go system for the next half-century.
The quality of this document is unanimously praised, but with caveats, which have been heard with increasing insistence in recent years, in the mouths of certain specialists, political figures and leaders of movements. employers. In their eyes, the COR reports would be too detailed and would allow all the speeches to be made on the real 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 results
Such criticism is due to the fact that one of the missions of this institution is to offer a large amount of data, to governments and citizens, without making a recommendation – because this is not part of its remit. Driven by the desire to provide a lot of information, the COR constructed, until very recently, financial projections based on three accounting conventions, leading to dissimilar results on the extent of the deficits and the time needed to fill them. . To simplify reading, it was decided to keep a single convention in the body of the report, and to keep another in the appendices.
But these choices have not extinguished all the reservations. Especially since Pierre-Louis Bras, at the time when he chaired the COR, was criticized by the executive for fueling confusion by asserting that “retirement expenses are not slipping”. His declaration, made at the beginning of 2023, irritated the government, at the time of carrying out a reform justified by the desire to preserve the budgetary balances of our pay-as-you-go system. A few months later, Mr. Bras was fired and Mr. Cet replaced him, at the beginning of November 2023.
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