Miscalculation in AHV forecasts Federal Supreme Court decides whether vote on raising the retirement age for women is valid
The Federal Supreme Court will decide on Thursday in public deliberation whether the ballot on raising the women's retirement age should be repeated.
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- The Federal Supreme Court will decide today, Thursday, in a public hearing whether the AHV vote of September 2022 is valid or whether it should be annulled.
- The question at issue is whether women will have to work until the age of 65 in future and whether the AHV will receive additional billions from VAT.
- The people had narrowly approved the increase in the retirement age for women to 65.
- According to the complaint, this was based on incorrect figures.
The people narrowly approved the increase in the women's retirement age to 65 on September 25, 2022. According to the complaint, this was based on incorrect figures.
This means that the electorate did not make an informed decision, according to the complaints lodged by the Greens and SP Women. The figures stated in the voting booklet were based on the incorrect expenditure forecast for the AHV and were therefore misleading.
The parties are demanding that the narrow result of 50.6 percent approval of the AHV 21 proposal be canceled and that the ballot be repeated.
According to the complainants, the incorrect forecast was the decisive factor in the population voting in favor of raising the retirement age for women from 64 to 65. The overly pessimistic figures would have cost women a year's pension.
Expenditure corrected downwards
On August 6, the Federal Social Insurance Office (FSIO) announced that it had incorrectly calculated the AHV's financial prospects. This led to an incorrectly high forecast of expenditure. This information was included in the voting documents for September 2022 as well as in those for the vote on the 13th AHV pension on March 5 of this year.
As a result, the AHV expenditure for 2033 had to be adjusted downwards by four billion francs after the vote. After a more precise recalculation, a downward correction of 2.5 billion remained. Suddenly, the AHV was in a better financial position than presented in the voting documents.
Substitute judges in the men's committee
After the calculation error became known, Minister of the Interior Elisabeth Baume-Schneider initiated an administrative investigation. The investigation report states that the inflated figures for the AHV financial perspective were not based on a calculation error. Rather, two functions had driven up AHV expenditure in the externally validated calculation program for the AHV financial perspective and thus led to implausible forecasts in the long-term perspective of over ten years.
FSIO Director Stéphane Rossini will step down at the end of June 2025. The former SP National Councillor from Valais took office at the end of 2019.
Two substitute judges will take part in the public deliberations of the First Public Law Division of the Federal Supreme Court in Lausanne on Thursday. In its normal composition, the panel consists only of men. However, the Federal Supreme Court regulations stipulate that "members of both sexes may be part of the panel if the nature of the legal dispute appears to justify this".