“The impudence was at such a level that a person who was born in 1959 received a Great Patriotic War pension,” after this and other such revelations of the Control Chamber, a struggle against kickbacks commenced in the social protection system. During a conversation with www.aravot.am, Artem Asatryan, the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, informed about the mechanisms they were going to employ for fight against abuses. We inquired whether there was such a vicious phenomenon in the system of beneficiaries when a social worker cut a deal with a beneficiary and the social worker got a few months’ benefit in return for including the beneficiary in the list. How will you reveal that, if it is in both parties’ interest? The minister replied, “Theoretically, it is not possible to rule out anything completely and to achieve a 100% result. However, if we talk about reducing to the minimum, 99% accuracy, I
think it is realistic. One can achieve that. The first task is to get respective data not from citizens, but the data collection of different institutions automatically, which rules out any interference. If we have certain data, we use their hard copies, which may always cause accidental or deliberate mistakes. There may be such mistakes while entering data from hard copies. And it is hard to find whether it is a deliberate or an accidental mistake. At the end of the day, we cannot rule out accidental mistakes either, because people may make mistakes. No one is ensured against mistakes. In that case, since we cannot clarify whether it was deliberate or accidental, naturally, we are not law-enforcers and we impose disciplinary and other punishments. However, it is clear that those cannot provide a solution.”
According to the minister, the fundamental solution to the problem is to get data from one source, “Now we have achieved the formation of all those data collections. Now one just needs to get those data automatically and rule out that anyone interferes with the process and makes any change. That same example with the date of birth, look, when you check out today’s pension system, data collection, the operator doesn’t enter the data – say the date, even the first and last names, even the address – into the base anymore. Only the passport data are entered, he presses one button and all these data are entered from the population’s state register into the data collection and all those cells are closed. There is no possibility to make any changes in them afterwards. It means that we have ruled out entering any inaccurate data, any incorrect person in that sense, since our citizens who live here, are citizens of the Republic of Armenia and have passports are registered in the population’s state register.”
According to the minister, there have been cases regarding disability when a citizen got a disability status and the extract read the third degree of disability. However, for some reason, the one who assigned a pension entered the second degree. It is possible that it was done by mistake, accidentally, “It means that it was changed and the pension increased, more money was taken from the budget. Now all that comes from the data collection of disabled people and is entered into the data collection and who can interfere with it? Only one person will be responsible – the administrator of the data collection. There will be no other option. If anything is wrong, a concrete person will be held accountable. If we solve these problems, we will not talk about these problems anymore.”
Read also
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
