Pension is nothing without control
(semi-cit.)
I wanted to tell you briefly about my institutional activity, because I think it may be of interest to some of you (in particular, doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, notaries, veterinarians, commercial agents, chartered accountants, bookkeepers, surveyors, agricultural company employees, labor consultants, professional nurses, psychologists, actuaries, veterinarians, journalists, and a few other categories).
As you may have heard me say, since September 13, 2023 I have been President of the Bicameral Commission for the Control of the management bodies of mandatory forms of social security and assistance (for friends: the Management Bodies Commission). For reasons unknown to me, it took more than a year at the top to put together the puzzle that led me to take on this role. I had only heard of the Management Bodies Commission once in the previous legislature (when I was on the Finance Committee in the Senate), because one of the officials assigned to my Commission had been taken away from me to assign him, precisely, to the "Management Bodies", whose function had been briefly explained to me. I never thought I would find myself one day presiding over it. At a certain point in the last legislature I had noticed the passing of my colleague Nannicini. Only later did I connect it to the fact that since February 23, 2021 he had become, precisely, President of the Management Bodies (my direct predecessor). A much more discreet or accommodating president, judging from what the web reports (little or nothing), despite the fact that during his mandate he had to manage a tough nut to crack: the transfer to INPS, starting from 1 July 2022, of the social security function until then carried out by INPGI, a measure taken in the budget law for 2022 by the Draghi Government. A fair relief for the information profession, which in fact thanked with the well-known applause:
This operation of buying consensus at the cost of a gigantic problem of moral hazard was not of great use to those who practiced it, but I fear it was of great damage to the credibility of the system of funds, which lives in an amphibious dimension: private (or privatized) entities that ensure a constitutionally protected right, so that as long as things are going well autonomy is claimed with heated tones, but when things go badly one is welcomed into the great arms of the state budget. It would be interesting to think about whether there were traces of this announced catastrophe in the work of the Commission (I think so).
The history of the Management Entities Commission is quite long and can be traced back to Royal Decree 2 January 1913, n. 453. Initially, a single bicameral Commission was supposed to supervise Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the pension system. The Commission was split in 1989. Fun fact: in the previous legislature I had been on the CDP Supervisory Commission, that is, on the "cousin" commission of the one I am currently honored to chair.
The work of a bicameral Commission suffers from the difficulty of having to reconcile the calendars of the two branches of Parliament and also that of having to deal with two Presidents. In fact, the Presidents of the Commission do not have external representation, and this means, for example, that each hearing must be authorised by the presidents of both branches (two letters to send, two authorisations to receive). These transaction costs can be reduced by setting up an "investigation" pursuant to art. 144 of the Rules of Procedure (the rules of the branch of Parliament to which the President belongs prevail, and therefore here we refer to the Rules of Procedure of the Chamber). Once the investigation has been authorised (by the presidents of the two assemblies), as decided in the Commission, the hearings scheduled in it can be carried out without further authorisations. For this reason, once we started to get going (the ranks of officials having been filled) we set up two investigations: one on investment policies, and one on the balance of management.
The first investigation ended last month and you can find the final document in the report of the session of June 12, 2025 , in which it was approved. I think you might be interested in reading it, and in any case it interested the information operators, who dealt with it, for example here :
(I point this out to the paranoid victimists: I'm not the only one who treats you badly!), but also here:
to my certain amazement.
In the meantime, it also happened that the offices of the Ministry of Labour took the work carried out by the Commission seriously and contacted the Funds asking for information:
and this is actually a satisfaction: it means that the work was useful.
Next July 8th we will present this work at the Sala della Regina in Montecitorio. If you have any comments, put them here, if you want to be there write to my address in the Chamber (but there are very few places).
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2025/06/la-pensione-e-nulla-senza-controllo.html on Sun, 29 Jun 2025 16:24:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.