Labor Minister Yiannis Vroutsis said that the findings are, unfortunately, very big and significant and prove the extent of the lawlessness in the country, either through omissions or deliberately, that has existed for years. He also described the effort underway at the ministry to set the social insurance system in order as "titanic".
Vroutsis said that his ministry, is going to "hold those responsible to immediate account, whatever their background," and that the legislation soon to be tabled in Parliament would make this clear to everyone.
Even though the suspended pensions represent only 0.4 percent of the total 4,412,797 pensions paid out each month in Greece, officials expressed grave concern that they managed to "slip through the net" during previous censuses of pensioners. They have not ruled out the existence of organised rings operating within the social insurance system itself.
The largest discrepancies were found in the larger social insurance funds - such as IKA, the civil servants' fund and the farmers' fund OGA - but were these were not absent in smaller funds as well. For example, 8,577 pensions to unidentifiable recipients were paid out by IKA, 3,266 by the civil servants' fund out of a total of 446,930, and 2,874 by the farmers' fund in a total of 745,629 pensioners.
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