The institution establishes an efficient organizational structure adapted to the needs and circumstances of difficult-to-cover groups.

The institution embraces electronic payment and online services and builds its success as an agency that adopts smart and cost-effective ways of delivering benefits and services and collecting contributions, giving due consideration to technical limitations and the characteristics of the target groups.

The communication unit allocates and spends its budget to achieve its goals in the most effective and cost-efficient manner.

Communication is a strategic tool in change management. Information is provided on what the change is, why it is necessary, what will be the benefits, and how and when it will be implemented. Good communications allow for issues to be quickly identified and addressed while maintaining momentum and building acceptance for the change.

To carry out its mandate and mission on contribution collection and compliance, the institution establishes a strategic plan covering at least a medium-term period.

The institution implements systematic and standardized data exchange to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the contribution collection and compliance system.

This data exchange must be controlled in order to protect people’s privacy, and balanced by a right to access and modification under the surveillance of an independent authority.

The board is the group of persons who, under the legislation or by-laws establishing the entity, is given the responsibility to govern the social security programme and to exercise oversight on its administration. The entity could be a government ministry or department, a statutory body or a private entity.

The 21 guidelines for the board support and promote the following five principles of good governance, as applied to social security institutions:

1. Accountability

2. Transparency

The board regularly, accurately and in a timely manner informs the stakeholders and the general public on the status of the social security institution and its operations.

Legislation, policy or decree provides for the independence of the Head of Management from political interference by prescribing the selection process and by defining the grounds for removal from office solely for just cause.

Members and beneficiaries are regularly and periodically informed of their rights and privileges.

A process model is developed for each administrative area to identify the potential points of failure, the internal or external events which can trigger risk, and the corrective measures to be implemented. There is ownership of responsibility for the potential points of failure.

The investment unit follows the prudent person principle in managing the funds of the institution. The prudent person principle is integral to the fiduciary duties of the board and management in administering and managing the funds of the institution.

The institution provides its members with quality service in the distribution of programme benefits.

There are three main aspects to corporate use of ICT) in social security institutions:

This set of guidelines addresses the delivery and support of ICT services, covering the aspects related to the overall software and service life cycle (planning, development and software construction, operations and maintenance). The purpose of ICT service delivery is to provide agreed levels of service to users, and to manage the technology that supports the application of administrative procedures implemented by the institution.

The institution has a workplan to manage the overall implementation of interoperable social security programmes.

Implementation may depend on prior steps having been achieved, such as developing supporting information systems, signing agreements with other organizations and installing enabling technologies. The workplan should cover all required information resources and products and facilitate economies of scale in implementation.

The institution develops mobile-based services according to institutional plans, taking into account the main types of user interaction and system integration approaches.

The institution implements the master data systems taking into account the functional requirements of all involved business areas of the institution.

The institution, in coordination with the others participating in the agreement, establishes an interoperability framework to implement international agreements.

The ISSA Guidelines on Investment of Social Security Funds allows members to follow a progressive process of governance. This starts with the setting up of the various structures involved in the process and includes defining roles and how these interact with the processes to be set up in order that governance objectives are met. These processes include defining and monitoring an investment strategy, monitoring performance and reporting.

The investment assumptions used in determining the investment strategy of the social security institution are fit for purpose. These assumptions will include assumptions for return, risk and correlation, and other factors as appropriate. Assumptions are considered over a suitable time frame (typically long term) to ensure the output of any modelling is consistent with the time horizon of the mission and goals of the social security institution.

The guidelines set out in this section refer to the situation where part or all of investment management is carried out by an internal investment unit. In such cases, the investment process will be the responsibility of employees of the social security institution and, although there may be external advice and support provided, the ultimate responsibility will lie with those employed directly by the institution.

The following guidelines are organized in two parts:

Part A, Basic Conditions for Prevention Programmes, deals with the structural issues that need to be addressed if social security institutions are to be able to support and facilitate the development of preventive approaches with and for enterprises.

Part B, Prevention Activities and Services, deals with specific prevention activities and services that can be offered.

The institution encourages enterprises to participate in prevention programmes by offering financial incentives.

Examples of financial incentives include “bonus-malus systems” or reward schemes that are applied in addition to risk-related contributions.

The figure below provides an example of a systematic approach to occupational diseases, starting from individual suspicion of an occupational disease and notification to the final decision on whether or not the diseases will be recognized by the social security institution. The decision on such recognition depends on causality between the disease and the workplace in order for the disease to be classified as occupational.