State will provide assistance and not compensations to poor families

The 11 socially vulnerable categories of people stipulated in the law on the social protection of the population will not receive nominative compensations from the state anymore. The Government wants to replace the present system of providing nominative compensations with a system of assistance that will be calculated depending on the incomes of the deprived families, in compliance with the European practice. If the new bill on social assistance, which was approved by the Government at its Wednesday’s meeting, is passed by the Parliament, the system of paying nominative compensations for the 11 disfavoured categories will be liquidated in two years, time during which it will be replaced by the new system. Minister of Social Protection, Family and Child Galina Balmos said that the recipients of nominative compensations from the given categories do not always represent the most deprived strata of the society and the living conditions and their real necessity for compensation are not taken into account when providing this social assistance. The value of the social assistance will be fixed after the families considered poor will submit an application to the local authorities as well as a number of documents showing how much they earn. If the authorities suspect that the real incomes are higher than the declared ones, the social assistants will go to the place of residence to see how the respective persons live. The assistance will not be offered if the applicants have means of transport, agricultural machinery, buildings with several storeys etc. The value of the social assistance for a family will be calculated according to a special formula. The minimum salary in economy that is 400 lei at the moment will be used as basis in the calculations. The minimum guaranteed income (100%) will be calculated for the person that filed the application, to which will be added 70% of the minimum salary for the second parent plus 50% for every child and 100% for the members with disabilities. The minimum salary in economy will be used as basis to calculate the assistance for the solitary persons with disabilities, plus 40%. The monthly declared income will be extracted from the obtained sum and the difference will constitute the assistance that will be provided by the state. The higher the family’s income, the lower the state assistance will be. It is planned that the new social assistance will be raised on April 1 of each year, in line with the rate of inflation. According to preliminary estimates, about 10% of the country’s population will benefit from state assistance. Approximately 262,000 persons receive nominative compensations at present. The budgetary expenditure on compensations in 2007 will amount to about 360 mln lei.