County pension offices will hire in the next period 1,000 staff to manually enter into the digital pension system the data from Romania's approximately five million pensioner files, Labor Minister Raluca Turcan announced on Wednesday.

"I came today to the National Pension Office because the emergency ordinance providing for the limited-term supplementation of the staff of county pension offices for speeding up the assessment and digitization of all pension files has been published in the Official Journal," Turcan said in a press statement after participating in a video call with the directors of county pension offices.

The LabMin said that 800 higher education and 200 secondary education staff will be hired.

"I also asked the presidents of county pension offices to not create false expectations and very clearly state that the hiring of this additional staff is only until the end of 2022, for this personnel to be exclusively engaged in the pension evaluation and digitization process," Turcan said.

"Under the National Resilience and Recovery Plan - NRRP, the pension system reform has 70 million euros earmarked. For the additional staff we have approximately 4 million euros. The relevant OUG provides that they will be paid from the state budget and the money will be recovered from the NRRP," the Labor Minister explained.

Regarding Prime Minister Florin Citu's statement that the available technology allows the scanning of the pension files for them to be introduced in the system, Turcan said that data from paper documents must be entered manually and scanning is not enough. AGERPRES (RO - author: Florentina Cernat, editor: Andreea Marinescu; EN - author: Simona Klodnischi, editor: Simona Iacob)