Reader asks: "My father is preserving his social insurance contribution period. However, recently he discovered that he is seriously ill and unlikely to survive.
So if a worker who is preserving social insurance dies, will they lose the money they have paid?
Regarding this issue, Vietnam Social Security (BHXH) said that if a worker dies while paying social insurance, or is preserving the social insurance contribution period, the amount they have paid social insurance will not be lost, but will be converted into a death penalty regime so that their relatives will be entitled to it.
This is a policy to ensure financial security for families when the main laborer in the family unfortunately passes away. Specifically, their relatives are entitled to death benefits including 2 items: funeral expenses and death allowance (one-time death allowance or monthly death allowance).
- First, the person who takes care of the funeral for the deceased worker (who has paid social insurance for 12 months) is entitled to a one-time funeral allowance, the benefit level is equal to 10 times the base salary in the month that person died. Currently, the funeral allowance is calculated at 23.4 million VND.
- Second, in case a worker dies after paying social insurance for 15 years or more and has not received one-time social insurance benefits, their relatives are entitled to a monthly survivor's allowance.
Accordingly, there are a maximum of 4 relatives belonging to the following 4 groups who receive monthly survivor's allowance. The monthly survivor's allowance that each relative receives is equal to 50% of the base salary (currently 1,170,000 VND/month).
In case relatives do not have direct caregivers, the monthly survivor's allowance for each relative is equal to 70% of the base salary (currently 1,638,000 VND/month). This is an amount of money to ensure that children (under 18 years old), elderly parents (out of working age)... of employees have a monthly allowance to overcome the difficult economic period because the main laborer in the family passed away.
In case the relatives of the deceased worker are not eligible for monthly survivor's allowance, or are eligible for monthly survivor's allowance but they do not want to receive this allowance, they can choose to receive a one-time survivor's allowance (except in cases where the child is under 6 years old, the child or spouse of the worker has a working capacity reduction of 81% or more).
The one-time survivor's allowance level is calculated based on the number of years that employees have paid social insurance, similar to the benefit level when withdrawing social insurance for one time. Specifically, each year of social insurance contribution is calculated as 1.5 months of the average monthly salary for social insurance contributions for years of social insurance contributions before 2014; each year of social insurance contributions is calculated as 2 months of the average monthly salary for social insurance contributions for years of social insurance contributions from 2014 onwards.
That is, if falling into this case, the employee will receive an even higher amount of money than withdrawing social insurance once (receiving an additional funeral expense of 23.4 million VND).
