Employee Capital Plans launched

2019 marks the start of a highly anticipated retirement system reform in Poland. In a recent official inauguration, Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, expressed hopes that the new pension scheme will positively affect not only every employee in the country but also the entire state through generating savings and driving economic growth.

Employee Capital Plans are a system of payments which are deducted from the employee’s salary every month. It consists of three elements: employee payments, employer payments and state payments. All these will be credited in individual accounts and stay there until an employee becomes 60 years old. Then the account holder will be allowed to withdraw the funds without the obligation to pay capital gains tax.

Employee Capital Plans will work alongside the state pension system. The new scheme will launch automatically for every staff member, unless they request to sign out, as the new system is not mandatory. It is hard to predict how many people will decide to participate in the scheme. To convince Poles to the new idea, state officials keep highlighting the fact that the funds accrued by future pensioners belong to them and are inheritable.

It may not be easy to convince Polish employees the system will work to their advantage. In practice, the capital plans payments will be deducted from people’s gross salaries. Employers, on the other hand, will have more red tape to deal with. Obviously, the employer’s contributions will be transferred onto the staff members whose renumeration will decrease even more. There are speculations the government moved introduction of the pension scheme forward so that the first transfers are made after the general election in autumn.

At this point, Employee Capital Plans only apply to big enterprises, i.e. the ones employing over 50 staff members. Gradually, the scheme will be extended to include medium and small companies.