Mind the nuances

Comment by Adam Kraszewski, managing associate at Gessel, Koziorowski sp.k.

An employer choses a financial institution with which he executes contracts for management and operation of employee capital plans (PPK), and then calculates and deducts contributions for the participating employees. Ought to be simple enough, right ?  Yet correct implementation of a PPK scheme requires due heed for a number of statutory nuances. For instance, in the context of the PPK rules, the category of “employees” encompasses not only regular workers, but also some contractors; accordingly, it will be incumbent on employers to verify the status of his contractors as students or as individuals covered by compulsory social insurance on some other legal basis. For new employees, contracts for PPK operation shall be executed upon the elapse of three months, counted in reference to the past 12 months; where several contracts are executed with a single person over the space of a single year, much attention must be devoted to keeping track of the deadlines. Quite apart from the above, the employer must take into account the age of each employee – depending on her age, an employee will be included in the PPK scheme by default, at her express request, or not at all. Only once the employer has sorted out all this minutiae may he settle back and make duly calculated contributions for employees who joined the PPK – bearing in mind that, for these purposes, the remuneration of the participating employee consists of not only her monthly salary, but also any bonuses, or even benefits in kind. The obvious conclusion is that implementation of a PPK scheme must be preceded by meticulous substantive preparation.

The full set of materials devoted to the PPK conference is available with today’s issue of Puls Biznesu (Adam Kraszewski’s text is also available online at www.pb.pl).