Pension backlog nears clearing

Greece’s social security agency EFKA is on the verge of dealing successfully with what has long been decried as a systemic failure: the backlog of pension applications.

EFKA employees are aiming to approve some 40,000 applications within the next 60 days. This would still leave out some 20,000-25,000 cases which present some intractable problems. Still, clearing the 40,000 is no mean feat when the norm had been hundreds of thousands of pending applications that often dragged on for upward of three years.

“EFKA now has the technical means to process some 25,000-30,000 pension applications per month,” Michalis Kefalogiannis, who heads the group in charge of processing the applications, said.

The social security agency aims at automating the process and approving pension applications within 90 days. This will take three years to set up.