EU CIVIL SERVICE: PENSION AND PAY NEGOTIATIONS.

Pay scheme.The Council's Statute Group is now reaching the crux of the matter with a much-awaited debate on revamping the pay system and the review of the pay adjustment procedure, which expires at the end of 2001. A report will be issued on the current system come December. An independent comparative survey has been undertaken by the Danish firm PLS Consult to consider the pay scale of European civil servants and of officials from certain Member States (Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom and Denmark, as well as three international agencies - NATO, the UN and European Investment Bank), as well as several international companies. The survey compares European civil servants' wages with those of civil servants in the Member States and officials in international agencies and multinationals. The sample of staff picked has been challenged by several Member States, which have called for the scope of the survey to be extended, particularly to non-expatriated national civil servants. The Commission believes this latter comparison is unjustified but has undertaken to provide the extra study.The Commission stresses the fact that the new pay adjustment procedure, just like the previous one, in 1991, should be long-lasting so as to avoid annual negotiations. This clarification had been made at a time when several Member States have sought to gain some wage flexibility or different categories of bonuses and perquisites. Several task forces have been set up to assess the relevance of the procedure's assessment criteria, and this applies in particular to rents and consumption patterns.Pension scheme.The Statute Group has resumed work on the future of the European civil servant pension scheme, in the light of a survey by KPMG and on the basis of a recent opinion from the Council's Legal Service, which considers that a change to the civil servant contribution rate and a raising of the retirement age could not be decided under the budget procedure. The German delegation said it wanted to have access to the audit that the Court of Auditors has performed on the KPMG's method for determining the actuarial debt of the pension scheme as well as an opinion from the EU Court of Justice. Germany is pressing the European Commission to speed up the process for making proposals, warning the institution that is would make a linkage between this issue and the one on annual pay adjustment with an eye to pension savings.Several delegations implicitly backed this...