Risk management is the process of identifying, analysing, accepting, mitigating or transferring uncertainty in investment decisions. Fund managers apply risk management by analysing and attempting to quantify the potential loss of an investment and then acting accordingly.

The KDD tool (KDD stands for Knowledge Discovery in Databases) is an application developed by the data science team of the Central Control Service (CCS) of the National Employment Office (NEO). The tool was developed in cooperation with the social inspectors to (1) improve fraud detection, (2) be able to prepare and treat their investigations more efficiently and faster, (3) improve follow-up on their results for reporting purposes and (4) to improve the feedback cycle for the data science team so their fraud detection models can be ameliorated.

The challenge addressed by the Federal Pensions Service (Service fédéral des Pensions – SFP) and its partners was the outdated pension application tool, prompting the integration of an online pension demand system into mypension.be, Belgium’s official online pension portal.

Due to the increasing number of pensioners, the rising cost of individual contacts and in order to benefit from automation, the Federal Pensions Service (Service fédéral des Pensions – SFP) and its partners are promoting online self-service.

Institutions are being transformed thanks to the integration of new technologies. This vision represents a corporate change with a social impact, reducing costs, simplifying processes and procedures, and raising awareness of the importance and benefits of this transformation.

The Dopflux procedure is an innovative approach developed by the National Employment Office (NEO) – Office national de l’emploi – ONEM – of Belgium to address the challenges posed by evolving career trajectories and their impact on social security programmes. This procedure enables the collection and analysis of comprehensive longitudinal data on employment situations and related socioeconomic factors among benefit recipients, offering valuable insights into the effectiveness of social security policies.

In times of increasing digitalization and dependence on IT, we see a war for talent in tech, while budgets are simultaneously facing ever-increasing pressure. Because of this, the efficient use of money and resources becomes increasingly important to allow for further growth in the realm of digitalization.

Article 12 of Law No. 5508 on the Promotion, Protection of Maternity and Support for Breastfeeding establishes that maternity allowance should be paid to employed women by the social security scheme of Paraguay’s Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social – IPS). This amount is equivalent to 100 per cent of her salary at the time of delivery, and is paid for the prescribed months of rest. This used to be given to women in a single payment.

The issue of population growth and social security planning is one of the biggest challenges facing governments today, and is a key part of a good social security system that instils confidence in its members.

The Retirement and Pension Fund for Employees of Banks and Related Institutions (Caja de Jubilaciones y Pensiones de Empleados de Bancos y Afines) (Bank Fund, hereinafter) is in constant communication with its members. It therefore continuously updates its databases, in order to have a better understanding of members’ current realities, experiences and needs.

Digital transformation is happening in institutions through the integration of new technologies. This vision represents an institutional and social change, optimizing available resources, reducing costs, shortening processes and procedures, and raising awareness of the importance and benefits of this transformation.

Technical debt – the extra work and costs involved in correcting poorly designed or suboptimal source code – is an inevitable part of any Information Technology (IT) project.

Used sparingly, it is a way of delivering added value to clients more quickly. However, allowing technical debt to get out of control and ignoring the issues involved are the main causes of both short- and long-term failures of Information & Communication Technology (ICT) projects.

Good practice in health – service quality.

As health-care systems have evolved to become more complex and due to the resultant increase in patients coming to harm in health care settings, patient safety has emerged as a health-care discipline.

The needs of end users are at long last being prioritized in digital projects. Those of intermediate users, on the other hand, are all too often neglected. Through its dedicated team of service designers, the Belgian National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) is gradually remodelling the interfaces of the tools used by its employees. And since a public service can only be complete if internal applications deliver the same level of user experience as end-user applications, ONEM decided to involve employees from the very beginning of the design process.

The Actuarial Advisory Office (Asesoría Actuarial) of the Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social – IPS) carried out an actuarial valuation of the Common Retirement and Pension Fund (Fondo Común de Jubilaciones y Pensiones). The valuation looks to comply with international best practices and observe the guidelines and standards of the International Standards of Actuarial Practice 2 (ISAP 2), and the ISSA-ILO Guidelines on Actuarial Work for Social Security, with technical support from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

The labour market has been hard hit by the coronavirus crisis. In 2020, Belgium’s National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) compensated some 2.3 million people, that is, one in every three workers. It also provided support to two in every three employers, some 70 per cent more than usual. Many workers found themselves temporarily unemployed for the first time and needing to make recourse to unemployment benefits.

Like most of the world’s countries, Paraguay has adopted lockdown measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. These steps taken by the government have impacted the productive sector, leading to mass suspensions of employment contracts for persons insured with the Social Insurance Institute (Instituto de Previsión Social – IPS) of Paraguay.

The coronavirus crisis has opened the floodgates to a tsunami of requests for the services of Belgium’s National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM). Following the closure of the ONEM offices to the public in March 2020, the organization’s contact centre was quite literally bombarded with requests from employers and jobseekers.

In Belgium and France, our social security systems were built to protect ourselves against unforeseen events in life. A common purpose at the heart of the International Social Security Association (ISSA): to allow everyone to live better.

Thanks to a concerted effort of the main actors in the Belgian health system, and with input from their partners, the Unit Audit Hospitals was able to answer important questions from responsible government actors about the impact of the subsequent waves of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both the dispersion of patient load throughout the Belgian landscape, as well as the adherence to prioritisation guidelines, and the backlog caused by the additional care required for COVID-19 patients, were thoroughly analysed using integrated data coming from these different actors.

Belgium’s National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) has been facing an unprecedented situation during the coronavirus crisis. On 16 March 2020, some 92 per cent of its workforce found themselves teleworking full time. As the ONEM continued to fulfil its social mission, maintaining the well-being of its staff became a priority.

For this reason, a number of initiatives were launched in March 2020:

Given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Belgium’s federal crisis centre needed real-time information on its social and economic consequences for the population, particularly for vulnerable groups.

To this end, the Federal Public Service for Social Security (Service public fédéral Sécurité sociale – FPS), the FPS Employment, and the Public Planning Service (PPS) Social Integration, were requested to take an initiative to meet this monitoring need as soon as possible.

The coronavirus crisis has had a major impact on Belgium’s National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM). On the one hand, the measures taken at a government level have triggered a high volume of work relating to unemployment benefits, among others. On the other, ONEM’s staff were forced, virtually overnight, to rethink how they work in order to be able to continue to fulfil the institution’s remit and provide insured people with the same quality of service.

Dynamic and inclusive social security systems rely on prompt and informed decision making, based on reliable current and historical data. The online open data platform developed by the Belgian National Employment Office − NEO (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) was crucial in achieving this goal.

The platform resulted from a series of strategic decisions.

Towards the end of 2018, the Auxiliary Unemployment Benefits Fund (Caisse auxiliaire de paiement des allocations de chômage – CAPAC) introduced a number of IT modules using deep learning aimed first at improving its quality control on unemployment file compilation activities and the payment of unemployment benefits; and second, at increasing the productivity of staff engaged in this work. The results are only recent but are excellent, with very low levels of investment and very short development cycles.

In order to continue to provide quality services in a changing and more demanding environment, the National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM), which manages unemployment insurance and career breaks, invests in innovation, change management and risk management. These three elements must be managed in a rigorous and integrated manner. It is therefore crucial to have the right people with the right skills in the right place. It is necessary to invest in the development of employee skills in order to make them agile and resilient so they can cope with change.

The mission of the National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) is to manage unemployment insurance schemes and career break schemes (parental leave, etc.). ONEM staff are in contact with various sectors of the public. In particular, 20.3 per cent of the Belgian population is said to be “at risk of poverty or social exclusion”. The training course is intended to raise poverty awareness among ONEM staff so that they properly manage clients who are in situations of vulnerability.

The career break programmes offer workers the chance to interrupt their careers temporarily or reduce their working hours by half or to four-fifths of the time to achieve a work-life balance, and receive replacement income from the authorities in the meanwhile. More than 400,000 people or about 10 per cent of all employed workers in Belgium use these schemes every year.

The National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) is responsible for managing unemployment insurance schemes and career break schemes (parental leave, etc.). Like most social security institutions, it is confronted by a great diversity of customers and staff.

Thanks to a huge business re-engineering process involving 3,000 actors in the Belgian social sector, a maximum number of social benefits and subsidiary rights is granted automatically, thus dispensing with the need for citizens and their employers to make any declarations, and drastically reducing the administrative burden for citizens and companies.

Based on a common and concerted vision, the actors in the Belgian social sector are taking full advantage of new technologies to improve and re-organize radically their mutual relationships and processes.

The National Employment Office (ONEM) has been using an integrated management model for a number of years.

This model is upgraded constantly and includes the vision, mission, values, strategic plan, operational plans, dashboards, the cost price calculation of and the of productivity measurement.

This management model has been materialized in the form of a management cockpit.

Over the past several years the National Sickness and Invalidity Insurance Institution (Institut national d’assurance maladie-invalidité (INAMI)) has been developing an active policy of occupational reintegration for persons receiving benefits under the invalidity insurance scheme.

It is an ambitious goal which involves close collaboration with fourteen independent family allowance funds, two special family allowance funds and 22 government agencies that, together, pay out EUR 3,700,000,000 per year for 2.1 million children in more than 1.2 million households.

To monitor the system, the Office:

In 2013, the National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) launched a strategic project, “New Way of Working” (NWOW), in order to adapt its organization and working methods to the new world of work. The strategy was to try and transpose a global concept of NWOW.                           

As a public institution with competence in the social field, the National Employment Office (Office national de l’emploi – ONEM) places great importance on its social responsibilities, including its ecological footprint. Sustainable development is also a concern for ONEM staff, as has been shown by employee surveys.

Since 2011, ONEM has developed a system of environmental management and implemented it progressively in all its buildings.

It targets jobseekers under 26 years of age with at most a secondary education certificate who have been unemployed for at least three months, unemployed workers aged at least 50 who have been unemployed for at least six months and unemployed workers receiving benefits who have been looking for work from one to two years. A subsidy (active unemployment benefit) which varies between EUR7501 and EUR1,100 per month is provided to encourage their recruitment. This subsidy is allocated for two years if they are taken on in 2010 and for one year if in 2011.

This scheme was reinforced in 2009 to assist enterprises and reduce layoffs during the crisis:

• access was extended to all workers including office (white collar) workers, temporary staff and agency workers;
• the amount of the partial unemployment benefits was significantly increased;
• partially unemployed workers were allowed to undertake training.

The National Employment Office (l’Office national de l’emploi (ONEM)) reduced its staff by 10 per cent between 2010 and 2014 and by an additional 5 per cent in 2015. The operating budget (material, premises and equipment) was reduced by 20% in 2015.

The volume of work nevertheless remained high since 2008 as a result of the continuing economic crisis and also because of additional tasks.

Therefore, the National Employment Office turned towards the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) approach, which included external assessment and, where applicable, awarded recognised accreditation in Europe.

The approach is comprised of various stages:

Ageing at work was a two year project (2007-2009) within the framework of the Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Learning Programme 2007-2013 of the European Commission.

The project was led by Prevent in Belgium and has partners in Greece (EWORX), Ireland (WRC), the Netherlands (TNO and Hogeschool Utrecht) and Poland (NIOM).

Project Aims

The project aimed at producing, testing and promoting training for human resource professionals on age management with a particular focus on health (i.e. integrated workplace health management).

The unit is composed of the employer, trade unions and sectoral bodies (training funds) and the regional employment service, which is responsible for its management.

As soon as redundancy is announced, workers are provided with support by the employment unit for a period of between three and six months during which they retain their wages and are exempt from the performance of their work.

This measure therefore transforms the "passive" period of notice or separation benefits into an "active" period of seeking employment, support and training.

A second phase of the prevention of violations has been implemented since 2010. A preventive system has been added which compares databanks before granting entitlement or before benefits are paid. Unwarranted benefit payments are therefore avoided at source.

The plan comprises two complementary sections:

This system has been progressively applied since 2004 and has enabled many unlawful cases of concurrently claiming unemployment benefits and receiving salaried, self-employed or disability income or pensions or pensions to be detected. More than 22,000 unlawful cases were accordingly detected in 2008 amounting to EUR 25 million (for information purposes, 404,000 persons were registered as unemployed in Belgium in 2008).

Authorized work includes home help such as cleaning, household shopping, ironing and assistance with travel for users who have reduced mobility.

Individuals pay EUR 7.50 per service voucher corresponding to one hour's work. They are entitled to 30 per cent tax relief (which reduces the actual cost to EUR 5.25). The public subsidy is EUR 13.60. The company consequently receives EUR 21.10.

The cost of the scheme is high and amounted to EUR one billion and 370 million in 2010 but the direct effects (40 per cent) and indirect effects are considerable.

The aim of the project is to increase the level of satisfaction of its personnel, their integration of common values and their well-being at work. It is based on a democratic, participative and emancipating approach which involved the entire organisation in its design and implementation.

Its success led to the introduction of two further projects between 2006 and 2008.

Strong measures have made it possible to prevent full unemployment and to reintegrate the long-term unemployed, whose numbers have fallen by 40 per cent. The measures include:

This project saw the following developments:

To qualify, the self-employed worker must not earn any income from work or receive any other replacement income (residual benefit).

Bankruptcy insurance is a compulsory branch of social security.

Scope of application: