Bituach Leumi is a scummy organization. Perhaps that is no different than any government organization, but that is the way it is. They do things like this all the time. People who move away from Israel continue to have to pay Bituach Leumi monthly payments. They don't get any letters or warnings, but 10, 15 or 20 years later when the person comes back to Israel, suddenly he is slapped with a debt of hundreds of thousands of shekels including interest and inflation. Kids turning 18 do not register, and years later they get these bills....Along with many other unclear situations in which similar things happen.
Bituach Leumi seems to have made it part of their business model to prey on people's lack of clarity in how Bituach Leumi and the payments work (it is very complicated) and take advantage of it to earn lots of money in interest payments.
Hopefully that will soon come to an end.
Many people recently brought their surprising letters to MK Eichler (UTJ) not knowing what to do with them. How can an avreich with no money suddenly pay tens of thousands of shekels in back payments? All along he could have managed to pay his minimum monthly payments (167nis per month per unemployed person, and 124nis per month for students and yeshiva students), but to get 8 or 10 years worth of payments in a bill all at once? Impossible.
Bituach Leumi came to an agreement with Eichler that they would allow all these people to pay off the debt in [up to 48] payments, and only pay the original debt and not interest or inflation.
More importantly for everyone else, Bituach Leumi is now obligated to inform people of their obligation to pay and send them requests for payment from the moment they become obligated to pay.
This is a good thing..
As soon as a person turns 18, or any other scenario, Bituach Leumi will have to send a letter and a bill explaining the requirement to pay the monthly fee.
All that being said, the people involved are a bit negligent. Even if most Israelis do not understand the complexities of Bituach Leumi and how the payments are calculated, let alone the rights and benefits people are entitled to as a result of those payments, Israelis do know that once they turn 18 they have to pay Bituach Leumi and need to take care of it. This was not the first time something like this happened, and all parents know that their kid turning 18 means he or she is no longer under the parents payments any longer. All these people were negligent in ignoring and avoiding doing what they really knew they needed to do.
source: Kikar
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------
As an Oleh Chadash, I can tell you that there's way more than this that I don't know about Israeli law and bureaucracy. It's entirely possible that I could have gone many years without learning this bit of information. Thankfully my daughter is still young, so I am likely to learn most of this stuff in time. But there's no guarantee.
ReplyDeleteA few comments:
ReplyDeleteOverall, you’re right, Bituach Leumi is a terribly run organization.
Eichler didn’t “come to an agreement with them”. As an accountant, I can tell you that once you pay your full debt, whatever it stems from, they will ALWAYS cancel the fines and sometimes the interest.
Finally, they do send out notices to kids who turn 18. That’s not new. Whether people read them is another matter.
Right - my son in Yeshiva gets notices from BL regularly - luckily my wife makes sure to pay them on time too (if it was up to me I would push it off until "we have extra money').
DeleteThere's a little secret in the existing software systems at Bituach Leumi... they don't re-evaluate your account unless a significant events occurs to you(r data). For example - changing Kupot, getting married / divorced / having a child, traveling out of the country, etc. Therefore if you turn 18 and don't start paying, you're debt is not being calculated every month and you're not marked as a debtor until something comes along to trigger a re-calc. Once you're marked as as debtor however, now you're in the debt handling system and they come after you with all means.
ReplyDeleteSo why did this group suddenly get letters? While I'm not sure, I did hear they found a software bug in a rule test and ran a re-evaluation of 400,000 people to correct for the problem. This may have, as a side effect, determined these people were debtors and sent them off to the debt system.
(The reasoning for this approach is to save Mainframe computer resources, due to the high costs of that computing model. So you don't re-calculate someone until forced to do so. This is indeed a very old model and old software approach. Good news, they're building a replacement system that will be real-time event oriented. Or bad news, if your status changed or changes and you were hoping not to be noticed.)