Key facts
Every year, more than 200,000 service personnel perform around 7 million days of military service, civil service or civil defence, or take part in courses for instructors in the “Youth+Sport” programme. Through the loss of earnings compensation (EO) scheme, these people receive payments totalling almost CHF 700 million a year. Every year, more than 600,000 forms are completed to apply for this compensation. In addition to service personnel, the payment process concerns their employers, the Armed Forces or other service organisations, the Central Compensation Office (CdC) and the compensation funds. The “Digitisation of the EO scheme (EOD)” programme, run by the Federal Social Insurance Office (FSIO), aims to digitalise this process. This programme should be completed by the end of 2026 and, according to estimates by the FSIO, should result in annual savings of around CHF 6 million for companies and the compensation funds.
In 2022, the SFAO evaluated the management of this programme, which was then in the initialisation phase, and judged it to be appropriate, while at the same time making several recommendations. In this latest audit, the SFAO assessed the status of the programme in its implementation phase in terms of potential for digitalisation and analysed the implementation of the open recommendations.
Overall, the audit findings were positive: the variants chosen for implementing the programme are understandable, its management has been improved and two recommendations relating to the calculation of profitability and the programme overview have been implemented. However, the SFAO expects the FSIO to raise the ambitions of the programme, so as to ensure the end-to-end digitalisation of the EO execution process. Two recommendations remain open: firstly, stakeholder management still needs to be improved and, secondly, the FSIO needs to define its objectives more clearly, create a system for monitoring objectives and take remedial action if they are not sufficiently achieved.