A new State Comptroller report on the State Employees Pension Administration says nine shortcomings identified in the previous audit, published in 2020, were either not fixed at all or only slightly improved. Only four issues examined this time were remedied to a large or full extent.
The administration, part of the Finance Ministry’s wage division under the Accountant General, is responsible for determining eligibility for civil service defined-benefit pensions and for paying retirees, survivors and other entitled beneficiaries. In 2024, it paid NIS 15 billion to 120,000 retirees and survivors, and the state’s total defined-benefit pension liabilities under its care reached NIS 374 billion at the end of 2024.
The report projects that annual defined-benefit pension payments will rise to NIS 41.73 billion by 2039. Comptroller Matanyahu Englman said the most striking figure was that the administration and the Accountant General reported zero completed fixes to the prior audit findings.
Among the problems, 14,001 pensioners had the maximum tax withheld even though they had not submitted Form 101 for tax relief by mid-September 2025. The comptroller also found that the service hotline answered calls within three minutes only 77% of the time between January and July 2025, a rate described as relatively low by the required standard. Another failure was the absence of a unified pension system, despite a government decision in October 2024, which the report says could save the state NIS 25 million a year.
Englman urged full implementation of income-tax regulations, stronger oversight of payments to survivors and orphans, and a review of the warning system that tracks when orphan-survivor payments should stop. He also called for immediate settlement of retroactive accounts with retirees and pension funds, faster call-center response times, and the creation of a shared computerized interministerial system for the Civil Service Commission, the Finance Ministry and the Pension Administration to ensure a more efficient, reliable and transparent retirement process.
