In the city of Turkmenabad, Lebap region, problems with obtaining certificates on the presence of a certain length of service have started. Officials refuse to issue the document to citizens who have reached retirement age, citing the loss or damage of archival records during the Soviet era. This was reported by Radio Azatlyk.
According to their information, several residents of Turkmenabad tried to apply for retirement a few months ago, but when they began to collect the necessary documents, they faced a search for data on abolished, renamed, or reorganized organizations where they worked during the Soviet era. And this is where the problems began.
After Turkmenistan gained independence in 1991, dozens of institutions were closed, reorganized, or renamed, Radio Azatlyk reports.
But despite the records on the place and period of a citizen’s labor activity, which are entered in his labor book by employees of local branches of the Pension Fund, the same agency requires citizens of retirement age to provide a certificate of work experience from each institution where he once worked.
Without this certificate, the employees of the structure refuse to confirm the length of service for the relevant period. In the end – the size of the pension of these citizens will be less than they expect.
It is impossible to obtain a certificate in the personnel departments of those institutions where people worked in the Soviet era. The reason is that most archive books are either lost or their pages are torn out, damaged or contain unclear information. And an average of 10 years of work is at stake.
To solve the problem, people appealed to the local authorities, but there were no results. This is at a time when high-ranking officials claim special attention to the issues of social protection of citizens, especially elderly Turkmenistanis.
The minimum pension in Turkmenistan in 2023 is 450 manat, which at the Central Bank exchange rate is $128 and at the black market rate is only $22.
The authorities, while promising to raise pensions by 10 percent annually, practice the opposite. In recent years, the Pension Fund has begun to revise the size of pensions, often reducing them.
The Turkmen authorities do not stop suppressing the population even in times of economic hardship and massive drop in living standards, as well as unemployment.
Because of this, people have to queue for social products before dawn, poor families have to attend other people’s weddings and banquets to eat, other people dig through rubbish cans in search of scraps, and the number of beggars on the streets is increasing. Knowing this problem, the Turkmen authorities turn a blind eye to the existence of socio-economic problems. And if a person is caught by law enforcers, he can be considered as “disgracing the country”. Is this justice?
