Hanoi (VNA) - Transferring the right ofsuing companies for overdue social insurance payment to workplace-based tradeunions has not been as effective as lawmakers had expected.

During an online round table discussion on theGovernment portal on May 8, Vietnam Social Insurance (VSI) Vice General-DirectorDao Viet Anh said the amount of social insurance debt companies failed to paycurrently reached up to some 14 trillion VND (622.2 million USD) in the firstquarter of 2017, doubling from last year’s total of 7.5 trillion VND. 

Worse still, there were only some 235,000enterprises registered with social insurance, while the database of the taxauthorities indicated that nearly 500,000 businesses were operating in Vietnam.

"It means that nearly 50 percent of theenterprises are yet to pay social insurance, or in other words are evadingsocial insurance payment," Anh said.

Suing these companies was an option that hadproven to be effective, at least in the past. Before transferring the task ofsuing to trade unions, the VSI was able to file some 8,000 cases in court, halfof which were settled, helping it collect 9.8 trillion VND in overdue insurancedebt.

The National Assembly, however, thought it wasinappropriate for the VSI to do both inspection and court work, and decided tolet trade unions manage the legal proceedings by voting through the Law onSocial Insurance which came into effect on January 1 last year. 

The results were, however, minimal. According toVietnam General Confederation of Labour Vice President Mai Duc Chinh, out of1,177 cases involving overdue social insurance payment that the VSI deliveredto the unions, only 77 were filed in court. While majority of these companiesagreed to pay the debt upon hearing of the lawsuits, some 17 cases weredisappointingly rejected by the court, Chinh said.

"One of the reasons was inconsistency inthe law," he said. "The Supreme Court argued that social insuranceevasion was a banned activity and should be first resolved throughadministrative penalties by the VSI. If the companies continued to avoid payingthe insurance, the case would then be brought to a criminal trial."

The Supreme Court’s decision was valid, sincedespite a regulation allowing lawsuits against companies under the socialinsurance law, the Civil Procedure Code failed to mention the matter, NationalAssembly’s Committee for Social Affairs Vice Chairman Bui Sy Loi said. Thedraft-amended Penal Code 2015 had regulations on social insurance evasion,however it was still waiting for the National Assembly to pass it through, hesaid.

Loi believed trade unions themselves also faceda lot of problems while filing lawsuits against the companies. The chairpersonand members of a workplace union were all workers of a company andunderstandably were quite reluctant to go against their employer, he said.Another problem was the requirement to have authorisation from all members ofthe union to officially initiate a lawsuit, which could require hundreds ofvisits to the local People’s Committee or the notary office.

"I think there is a way around this, whichis to dismiss the authorisation demand while letting local unions or labourfederations file the lawsuit on behalf of workplace unions. They also have morelegal resources and consultancy to start and follow a lawsuit compared withworkplace unions anyway," Loi said. - VNA