Poland will put its planned reform of the lingering OFE pension funds on hold to an unspecified future date as market conditions and pension saver preferences derailed early plans, deputy Minister of Finance Tomasz Robaczyński announced.
„We have a few problems with OFE,”Robaczyński told a lower house commission. Amongst problems: „one is the decline in assets” and another is „a mistaken early forecast” concerning how many people would choose to have their funds converted into post-tax retirement savings accounts IKE and how many would prefer to send their savings back into the public system, Robaczyński explained.
Poland may also have met difficulties in plotting the fee it would charge for converting pre-tax savings into post-tax savings. Robaczyński speaks to a fee that „would have been lower.”
Poland had planned on winding down the OFE pension funds, allowing savers to convert their funds from pre-tax OFE funds to post-tax IKE retirement savings accounts at a fee and killing off all flows between the funds and the state budget. Savers would also be allowed to avoid the fee by sending their savings into the state system. However, a formal decision has not yet been taken, Robaczyński nonetheless qualified.
