Members of the National Council (NR) of the Slovak Republic will receive energy assistance, their exclusion from it would be unconstitutional. However, they have the option to go directly to the electricity and gas retailer and change their tariff to one that which is not compensated by energy aid. The fact that MPs will also receive energy aid was due to data that the Ministry of Economy (MH) of the Slovak Republic obtained from electricity and gas sellers. Economy Minister Denisa Saková (Voice-SD) said this at Wednesday’s meeting with the media.
“It was a decision (on the exemption of MPs from energy assistance), which we first wanted to transfer directly into lawbut there was no agreement on this decision, and later we transferred it to the regulation, where today we received a legislative opinion that, on the one hand, it cannot be in the regulation and it was also argued that it would be unconstitutional. This means that there is no error in the system and in the calculation. Simply some MPs, whether it is a woman with two children or MPs who have children and a wife on maternity leave or some MPs who live with parents with a low pension, they fell into the trap of receiving energy assistance“, said Sakova.
She further specified that The department could not assign 166,431 electricity take-off points and approximately 1,400 gas take-off points to a specific household, due to an error in the name or address. MH is gradually trying to correct these system errors and data inconsistencies with distribution companies and sellers of electricity and gas.
“We have made a decision that we will compensate all these unassigned electricity and gas collection points with the fact that as we gradually clean them, so we will find exactly ten percent of them that belong to the rich uncompensated people and then we will take away the compensations from them,” Sakova added, stating that energy assistance will be taken away from these people during the first reassessment.
The head of the Department of Economy explained that people in case of dissatisfaction with the decision not to approve the energy aid, they will be able to file an objection directly at the client workplace of the district offices, which check the creditworthiness of a particular household. “We expect that on Sunday, December 14, all data processing will catch up with us so that we can fill the systems of client workplaces. We hope that on December 15, we will be able to directly start processing these objection processes for citizens,” Sakova concluded.
At the same time, she specified that compensation of electrical energy does not automatically mean compensation of heatas someone can live in a location where heat prices have not increased for many months. Furthermore, if someone does not buy gas, they can still be entitled to energy assistance, since the creditworthiness of the household is calculated according to the income of its members. According to the minister, the first reassessment of the energy assistance could be after three months and the next sometime in the summer months, but with the consent of gas and electricity sellers.
On Wednesday, the government also approved a regulation that the income from dividends will also be counted in the creditworthiness of the household. “We expect that in half a year, if the Financial Administration starts collecting such information (about income from dividends) in accordance with the effectiveness of this law from January, we assume that In half a year, we should have this information at our disposal, and we will make a reassessment,” Sakova concluded.
