Social Insurance Agency

What it means

The Social Insurance Agency administers social insurance: sickness, old-age and disability pensions, unemployment, accident and guarantee insurance, and the solidarity reserve fund. It collects contributions and pays benefits.

For an employer it is the principal counterparty in payroll. Registration, notification and payment duties are all owed to it, within deadlines that cannot be moved by agreement.

It does not run health insurance, which the health insurers collect, nor does it manage savings in the second pension pillar. It does collect second-pillar contributions together with social insurance, but passes them on to a pension management company, which holds them in the saver’s personal account.

How it works in practice

The monthly cycle is fixed: register the employee before they start, file the monthly contribution statement, pay the contributions on time, deregister on termination. Alongside run the interruptions - sick leave, maternity, parental leave, unpaid leave.

Benefits are a stream of their own: sickness, carer’s and maternity pay. The employer prepares the inputs from the payroll record and attendance data; the same changes go to the health insurer in parallel.

For the self-employed, the Social Insurance Agency itself works out from the filed tax return whether compulsory insurance arises and on what base, and notifies the result. So once the return is filed we recalculate the client’s new assessment base in advance, so they know what levy to expect before the notice arrives.

What to watch out for

Registering an employee late is penalised in its own right, regardless of whether the contributions were paid. An inspection checks whether they were registered before work began under the employment contract - not on the day wages were paid.

When an employee is posted to work in another EU country, a portable A1 document has to be obtained from the Social Insurance Agency beforehand, confirming that they are insured in Slovakia. Without it the foreign institution may demand contributions as well, and the company ends up dealing with double levies and arrears in the country it sent the employee to, often backdated over the whole posting.