The number of people connected to the personal account section on the Russian Pension Fund’s website is growing year after year; it is being used to receive public services online. The year 2018 was no exception. The number of authorizations made in the personal account section grew by 43.8% to 5.1 million in the first half of the year. The number of requests for services grew by 58.7% to 11.7 million, which means that the personal account section is daily accessed 55,000 times on the average.
There has been an increase in traffic for practically every service. Most users request up-to-date information about pension entitlements and assigned pensions and benefits. The demand for such services has grown by 270%. As a result, nearly half of people who accessed the personal account section in the first half of this year requested information of some kind. A total of 2.45 million requests sought information about assigned pensions and social benefits, while 1.3 million enquired about pension entitlements, including pension points and work record. There were 1.3 million requests for information about the maternity capital balance.
Applications constituted another major block of services in the personal account section. There are 39 types of online applications for various services and benefits of the PFR. Most popular are applications for the assignment of pensions and pension savings, as well as the choice or modification of the pension delivery method. As many as 2.3 million applications were filed in this section in the first six months of 2018.
The most popular of relatively new online services, which became available late last year, are the revision of pensions (172,000 applications filed in 2018) and benefits received by people looking after disabled citizens (189,000 applications). Two new services were launched in the middle of 2018. One of them provided online access to the assignment of professional pension supplements for former civil aviation and mining industry employees, and the other was related to the assignment of pension supplements for outstanding achievements and merits.
There will be a number of updates in the personal account section before the end of this year. Pensioners who change their place of residence will be able to notify the Pension Fund about that online. Pensioners living in the North will be able to file online requests for compensation of their resettlement expenses. Families that own maternity capital will acquire online access to monthly payments, which were endorsed in the beginning of 2018.
PFR online services cover practically all areas of the Fund’s activity and payments received by citizens. They can be used by both pensioners and working people. Access to most online services requires an account verified in the identification and authentication system esia.gosuslugi.ru. Those who have no such an account can contact the Pension Fund’s client service for the proper registration.
The online appointment service available in the personal account section makes it possible to plan one’s visit to the Pension Fund; it can be used even by unregistered users. The PFR appointment service was used by more than half a million people in 2018.