Add more benefits for voluntary social insurance participants?

The Government has submitted to the National Assembly a draft revised Law on Social Insurance. Accordingly, the Government proposes to amend the regulations that employees participating in voluntary social insurance (including both male and female employees) who give birth and meet the conditions of paying insurance for at least 6 months within 12 months before giving birth will receive a subsidy of VND 2,000,000 for one child.

According to the Government, adding maternity benefits to the voluntary social insurance policy aims to increase the attractiveness of the voluntary social insurance policy, attracting people, especially young workers, to participate in voluntary social insurance.

In the preliminary review report of the Draft Law on Social Insurance (amended), with the proposal of maternity allowance for employees participating in voluntary social insurance, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly's Social Affairs Committee found that: The regulations of the maternity allowance regime only focus on the material benefits that employees participating in voluntary social insurance enjoy; not paying attention to other very important benefits such as taking time off work to go for prenatal checkups, taking time off work when implementing contraceptive measures, taking time off work to recuperate and recover after maternity leave, taking time off work when terminating pregnancy, etc.

The Standing Committee of the Social Committee believes that these are very necessary benefits for female employees during pregnancy, and at the same time demonstrate equality between social insurance regimes in the national social insurance system. Therefore, the Standing Committee of the Social Committee recommends that the Government should study and consider assessing the impact of regulations on applying maternity leave, pregnancy termination and leave to implement contraceptive measures for employees participating in voluntary social insurance similar to employees participating in compulsory social insurance.

In addition, the Standing Committee of the Social Affairs Committee also requested the Agency in charge of drafting the Law on Social Insurance (amended) to continue studying international experience on subsidy regimes for children of employees participating in voluntary social insurance such as: Discounted/free vaccination, tuition support, study costs for school-age children, etc. This is to continue implementing the goal set out in Resolution No. 28 "Research and design flexible short-term voluntary social insurance packages so that employees have more options to participate and benefit", encouraging informal workers and migrant workers to participate in voluntary social insurance.

Regarding maternity allowance for voluntary social insurance participants, the Standing Committee of the Social Committee found that: The number of voluntary social insurance participants is not high; the regulation on maternity allowance for social insurance participants at 2,000,000 VND is not suitable to reality, this is the support level implemented since 2015. Therefore, to attract workers to participate in the social insurance system early, the Standing Committee of the Social Committee proposed that the Government study to increase the level of maternity allowance support to be more appropriate.

At the same time, research is being conducted to supplement the legalization of pre-payment regulations as Decree 134/2015/ND-CP is implementing to increase the attractiveness and specify Article 7 of the draft Law on Social Insurance (amended).

The Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs summarized that in the period of 2016 - 2021, the whole country has more than 54,000 people participating in voluntary social insurance who are eligible for pension. Thus, each year, there are 9,000 more people receiving pension when participating in voluntary social insurance.

According to statistics from Vietnam Social Security, by the end of 2022, the whole country had more than 1.46 million people participating in voluntary social insurance, an increase of 1% compared to 2021.