Prague, July 30 (CTK) – The Labour and Social Affairs Ministry plans to declare a big tender for a new information system for the payment of Czech pensions costing approximately 300 million crowns in late August or early September, Deputy Labour Minister Robert Baxa has told CTK.
The Czech Social Security Administration (CSSZ) is expected to start using the new information system in 2020.
The ministry approved the basic parameters of the tender this week, Baxa said. The contract with the winner of the tender is to be signed in mid-2018 if all goes well, he added.
The CSSZ pays out nearly 2.9 million old-age, disability, widow’s and other pensions as well as sickness benefits and the maternity pay. Several hundred billions of crowns are paid out every year.
The systems and programme that the CSSZ is currently using are 20 to 30 years old.
New systems for the payment of welfare benefits and for employment administration are to be introduced. The tenders for these systems were declared in 2014 and the systems were originally to operate as of January 2017, but their introduction has been postponed by about two years. The ministry had to sign a new contract worth about one billion crowns with the OKsystem company that operates the old system.
The CSSZ also recently declared a competition for a mainframe computer worth 261 million crowns that is needed for the operation of the present system of pension payment until the end of 2021.
Czech media reported about the IT tenders that the CSSZ declared: they wrote that audits revealed mistakes and three tenders declared in 2015 have so far failed to produce a winner. Labour Minister Michaela Marksova (Social Democrats, CSSD) filed a criminal complaint related to the suspicious tenders. The CSSZ is now taking corrective measures, the situation is to be checked in late September, Baxa said.
