Employers did not take out accident and occupational disease insurance due to lack of information
Last year, the supervision of the Finnish Workers' Compensation Centre found that more than 3 000 employers had failed to take out accident and occupational disease insurance of all supervised employers. The most common reason for neglecting the obligation was that the employer had not been aware of its obligation to provide insurance.
In 2023, the supervision carried out by the Finnish Workers' Compensation Centre (TVK) examined 6 415 employers, of whom 3 196 were found to have neglected their obligation to take out accident and occupational disease insurance.
The number of employers included in the investigation and the number of detected negligence decreased from 2022, when TVK's supervision investigated more than 9 000 employers, of which approximately 4 500 had neglected their insurance obligations.
Although fewer cases of negligence were detected now, there were still more cases than in the years prior to 2022.
As fewer cases of negligence were detected, and negligence periods are short thanks to up-to-date handling, wages and salaries for uninsured work decreased to EUR 33,7 million from over EUR 50 million in 2022.
Last year, employers who neglected their insurance obligations paid TVK a total of EUR 1,22 million in negligence fees.
The distribution between industries of employers that failed to comply with their insurance obligation remained unchanged from previous years. As in the previous year, other service activities, professional, scientific, and technical activities and construction were the industries with the highest incidence of negligence in 2023. However, the differences between industries are small.
"The result of the monitoring was not surprising. Although the numbers decreased after the previous exceptionally extensive monitoring year, the results are similar to previous years, and our supervision is well-established and effective," says Niina Laakso, Head of Supervision at TVK.
TVK has a statutory supervisory task
TVK's statutory duty is to supervise the fulfilment of employers' insurance obligations. The task is prescribed for TVK in the Workers' Compensation Act.
TVK has supervised the insurance obligation since the entry into force of the Workers' Compensation Act in 2016. The monitoring targets all employers who have paid wages in Finland.
The main method of carrying out supervision is retrospective mass surveillance, in which TVK's supervision extracts data on wage payments from the Incomes Register and compares them with the data in the insurance register.
If the employer has reported to the Incomes Register that it has paid wages, but the insurance register does not contain information on the accident and occupational disease insurance taken out by the employer, TVK's supervision picks up the case for further examination.