If you are seconded [1] (French: ‘détachés’/ Franglais [2]: ‘detached’) at your own request (i.e. not in the interest of the service [3]) to another institution or to an agency, then this article is for you and concerns your pension rights. Everybody else can safely skip to another article of this newsletter [4] (but of course, feel free to read on if you are curious 😊).
If you are seconded at your own request, your monthly pension contribution should be calculated based on the grade you had in the Commission before this secondment (Art 39(d) of the staff regulations) – it should not be based on the grade in your host service. Often, colleagues are seconded at their own request to occupy a post in the host service that has a substantially higher grade than their post in the Commission. Therefore, this change in the grade for the calculation of the pension contribution can make for a substantial difference. This difference does not apply to your pension contribution only –your final pension will also be calculated based on the (probably lower) grade in the Commission.
The Commission has recently published administrative notice 05-2023 [5], titled “Change of the pension contributions paid by officials seconded at their own request”. This notice, together with its annex, explains the details. It seems that for some colleagues, the calculation for the pension contribution was until now done based on the (higher) grade in the host service. The administration is obliged to rectify this situation, but they have assured us that colleagues concerned by this change would be contacted individually.
Basically, those of you currently seconded at your own request have two choices:
- You can stay seconded at your own request. Then, you pay your pension contribution based on your lower grade in the Commission. In this case, your final pension will also be calculated on your grade in the Commission.
- You change to a leave on personal grounds [6] (CCP), after which you also have to submit a request for an outside activity [7]. If you then retire during your time in the host service, your pension will be calculated based on the grade you had in the host service.
If you want to request a change in your administrative status, you have until mid-May 2023 to do so; the administration needs a certain amount of time to process the related paperwork.
For any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch [8].
If you appreciate our work, please consider becoming a member of Generation 2004 [9].
Check out Pensions and invalidity allowances guide [10] for more information.