Filenews 23 August 2021 - by Adamos Adamou
The "war" against undeclared work is intensifying from next month with the implementation of the information system "Ergani", the software that has been granted free of charge by the Hellenic Republic to our country.
The "Ergani" system, as the General Secretary of SEK Andreas Matsas told "F", will be implemented on September 13th and is expected, he added, to significantly strengthen the efforts to address undeclared and under-reported work, as well as the work of the Unified Inspection Service of the Ministry of Labour.
Mr. Matsas also mentioned that based on "Ergani", the employer will now be obliged to submit electronically all the details of his staff, at least one day before the start of his work. With the launch of the system, better labour market surveillance is expected to take place as well as an improvement in inflows to the Social Insurance Fund.
As the deputy director of the Department of Labour Relations, Andy Apostolou, explained to "F", the application of "Ergani" essentially ends the practice applied since 2012 regarding the triptych and tricolour paper document that employers are obliged to fill in for certificates of commencement of work.
Now, he said, with the implementation of "Ergani", the certificate of commencement of work will be done through the system and only electronically one day before the start of the work of an employee. In fact, from the 13th of the month, the procedure for declaring recruitment will be changed, which according to Mr. Apostolou, will be done electronically, more easily and with less bureaucracy, while he himself acknowledged that the new procedure will make it easier to check for undeclared work.
Mr. Apostolou recalled that the "Ergani" system, which is one of the most modern in the EU, was given free of charge by Greece to Cyprus under an agreement between the Minister of Labour and her then counterpart in 2018 and that there is planning in the next few years to utilize other functions of the system for monitoring the labour market. In the first phase, he said, it will be used for the certificates of commencement of work but in the future it is planned, among other things, for employers to use it, as part of efforts to reduce bureaucracy, and to post and inform the competent services about the terms of employment of their staff and other data, as the aim is for "Ergani" to be the main tool for controlling the labour market.
