Technical Commissions

Technical Commission on Old-age, Invalidity and Survivors' Insurance

Technical Commissions

Technical Commission on Old-age, Invalidity and Survivors' Insurance

The Technical Commission on Old-Age, Invalidity and Survivors’ Insurance deals with issues relating to pensions and disability payments.  Central to its work, demographic changes have a significant impact on both the sustainability of programmes and the changing needs of the population. The technical commission also looks into the macroeconomic and social issues linked to these programmes.

The Technical Commission on Old-Age, Invalidity and Survivors’ Insurance draws together many age- and disability-related issues, dealing with the macroeconomic, technical and operational aspects that arise from these issues.

As a commission specializing in benefits, it ensures that such matters are included in ISSA policy documents on general subjects such as communication, extension of coverage, governance, combatting fraud and service quality, which may have specific characteristics, particularly in terms of long-term benefits. It thus plays a role in drawing up ISSA Guidelines by approaching them from this angle.

In addition, the technical commission regularly supplies the ISSA with good practices that may be of interest to its member institutions. These may concern, for example, the regular and proactive provision of pension-related information to insured persons during their working life; the sharing of individuals’ personal data using a computer language common to the different institutions; the development of support services targeted at vulnerable people; or the overseas payment of pensions.

The Technical Commission on Old-Age, Invalidity and Survivors’ Insurance also coordinates the thinking of social security institutions responsible for pensions around topical issues, proposing apposite policies on the basis of concrete knowledge or field surveys whose responses are subject to analysis by all members. Once these responses have been validated by the commission, they are then compiled in a technical report that is published under the commission’s name at the World Social Security Forum.

As the commission with the most members, the Technical Commission on Old-Age, Invalidity and Survivors’ Insurance also publishes the most technical reports. It has, for example, been able to produce reports on topics such as digital platform workers’ pension coverage; regular, proactive and individual communication with working members, by letter, regarding their accumulated pension rights; gender equality in pension calculations; the correlation between the financial sustainability of long-term risks and pension adequacy; the potential consequences of delaying the statutory retirement age on the benefits accorded by disability schemes; and pension policies that have been adapted to encourage people to remain in some form of activity (active ageing).