Severance indemnity (TFR) borne by the Treasury Fund

From 1 January 2007, private employers (excluding domestic employers) with more than 50 employees are obliged to pay to the Treasury Fund the instalments accrued by each worker and not intended for supplementary pension schemes. The obligation is extended (limited to displaced workers) also to non-obligated companies that, through corporate operations, have acquired workers from obligated companies.

Employees (who have left the employment) of companies obliged to pay to the Treasury Fund who have chosen to leave, in whole or in part, their severance indemnity with the employer.

The liquidation of the benefit is carried out in full by the employer including the portion of the Fund. Upon the occurrence of certain conditions, provided for by Law 296/2006, only the employer may submit the claim for assistance to the Treasury Fund (online or with xml files) for direct payment to the employee of the severance indemnity (INPS Circular No. 21 of 7 February 2013).

Claims for advances of severance indemnities must also be forwarded to one's own employer who, once the necessary conditions provided for by Law no. 296 of 27 December 2006 have been met, may send a request to the Treasury Fund. In this case, of course, it is not necessary to terminate the employment relationship.

The Fund shall pay the severance indemnity directly to the worker within 30 days of completion of the claim.

When the number of beneficiaries to be included in the claim is high, it may be preferable to use the method of sending the claim through XML files, as an alternative to the online mode.

The technical information is indicated in the attached documentation:

• Operating manual (pdf 308KB): operating user manual, with specification of the procedure and description of the related information;
• XML Schema Definition File (xsd 25KB): XML Schema Definition XSD file;
• Exchange mode (pdf 308KB): instructions for opening the electronic communication channel between the Company and the Institute, used for file exchange.

It is recommended to:

• scrupulously follow the following conventional wording “CompanyName.INPS.TFR.ddmmyyyy.hhmmss.n.xml" as indicated in the operating guide;
• before sending individual XML files, validate the file against the XSD definition file to check for syntactic-violation blocking errors in advance;
• in order to avoid excess processing of files, which would inevitably lead to delays in the definition of the same (e.g. for requests for additional documentation), verify the quality of the data present in the XML files produced.

The most frequent errors are the following:

• in the case of advances paid, the severance indemnity is indicated net of advances instead of gross. Note that, in the case of advances paid, in order to allow the Institute to produce a coherent tax documentation, it is necessary to indicate all the amounts before taxes (severance indemnity required, early severance indemnity) as well as the amount of taxes on advances paid;
• the amounts of revaluations are higher than they should be. Often this error is also made when sending UNIEMENS reports, the correction of these errors also requires the sending of corrective UNIEMENS reports and the time necessary to process them;
• the amount of the contributions in the month of incapability is not indicated, this information is necessary to verify the incapability and therefore the verification of the requirements to be able to provide the direct payment.

It is possible to submit technical questions regarding the compilation of XML files or the management of the files produced by the acquisition procedure by writing to the institutional email account Info.FondoTesoreria@inps.it.

The XML files produced following the instructions above must be sent through an electronic communication system, the establishment of which must be requested by contacting the team "Telematic Transfers" (email: TrasferimentiTelematici@inps.it) as indicated in the document "Exchange methods". The team will take charge of the activity by requesting the necessary parameters from the Company and entering the request in the implementation queue, resulting in an average wait of ten working days. At the end, the team will contact the requesting Company providing the s_FTP authorization for the activities to be carried out on our servers.

The INPS local offices are available to insured subjects and companies for all needs related to individual measures.

The ordinary deadline for issuing the measures is set at 30 days under Law no. 241/1990. In some cases the law may set different deadlines.

The table shows the deadlines exceeding thirty days, set by the Institute with a Regulation.

In addition to the terms for the issuance of the decision, the table also indicates the relevant manager.