Will the critics of the work of the Pensions Orientation Council (COR) win their case? The victory is not acquired, but a door opens. The body created in 2000, and responsible for analyzing the perspectives of the different regimes, invited two of its fierce critics, François Bayrou and Jean-Pascal Beaufret, for a debate on September 21. The High Commissioner for Planning, like the former senior civil servant, has been dismantling the COR figures for a long time. Their credo: the deficit of the pension system has been largely underestimated. The discrepancy, which could represent 30 billion euros, results from a quite questionable accounting bias, that of admitting that the system of civil servants is balanced. In truth, this balance is quite relative since it depends on… a State subsidy.
“The COR has retained this accounting convention since its creation, when it could be thought that the State accounts were moving towards a return to balance, which has not been seen since 1980. But the opposite is true. However, a State whose accounts are unbalanced cannot wipe out the deficits of the pension schemes it finances, for civil servants or other special schemes, this is an accounting impossibility! and for twenty years, 16% of state spending has been financed by deficits, maintains Nicolas Marques, director general of the Molinari Institute, who is passionate about the subject.The COR does not take this into account, its erroneous indicator leads to denying the problems”.
“Before 2017, the COR claimed that there was no problem with funding pensions, and in a way it persisted, criticizes François Bayrou. This clarification should have taken place last fall, when I had asked for four months to investigate the matter in depth”. The executive then turned a deaf ear. An astonishing silence because acknowledging the true extent of the deficit would have provided grist for the government’s mill, supporting the need for reform.
François Bayrou sees this “confrontation” announced with the COR as “a good opportunity to show that the Plan does not have the usual approach of the public authorities. When we project ourselves over 10, 20, 30 years, we are not prisoner of the back and forth of opinion or the dictatorship of the polls.” Better late than never even if, in the meantime, the democratic debate has not emerged as a winner.