Particularly in periods of financial crises like today, social security schemes have to deal with the question how best to manage funds to balance the competing demands for services on the one hand and fund revenues on the other and how to make sure that benefit payments can be made according to legal entitlement on a long term sustainable basis.
The issues related to fund management encompass a wide range: from the process of authorization and approval of budgets, to the standardized accounting of social insurance expenditures and revenues in a consistent way to actual fund structures themselves.
Among current fund management-related issues in China are questions of unification of contribution and collection methods, investment of fund balances particularly in pensions, supervision of funds, prevention of corruption and fraud and the development of internal control systems. The management of the administration budget and the flexing of the budget in relation to changing workload patterns in social insurance is also very important.
