Your employment and labor law lawyer

Employers who are employing an employee require a company number to register with the social security authorities and to pay the social security contributions. The company number is assigned on application by the Company Number Service of the Federal Employment Agency in Saarbrücken. After approx. three working days the company number that has been newly assigned will also be known to the German social insurance agencies. We therefore recommend to wait three days before the first registration is transmitted to the social security authorities.

Upon the registration with the social insurance authorities, the employer informs the health insurance fund about the start of employment and transmits certain information on the employed person and the employment. As a company you need to ask your employee which German pension insurance fund he has selected.

The employee’s personal information should be taken from official documents of the employee, such as the social security number from the social security card. If the employee does not yet have a social security number, due to the fact he has never been employed, for instance, the registration requires more of his personal details about him (place of birth, name at birth and date of birth).

Registrations sent to the social security authorities are performed by means of electronic data transfer.

The employer’s duties include determining the wage that is subject to social security contributions that must be paid for each employee and to calculate the contributions from this.

By means of the statement of contribution the employer provides notice before the payment date of the sum total of deductions, which he will pay in total for all employees for one month. The information is therefore not personal, but recorded as a total amount. Here the sum of the contributions consists of contributions towards health and nursing care insurance, pension and unemployment insurance as well as the employer’s insurance and insolvency fund contributions.

The statement of contributions must – in the same way as the notifications sent to the social security authorities – be transmitted by means of approved system-tested programmes or by means of a computer-generated completion aid.

The contributions must have been received by the Bundesknappschaft insurance fund by the due date at the latest.

The easiest and most convenient way of paying the contribution is by providing the Bundesknapschaft insurance fund with a SEPA direct debit mandate. This thus guarantees the contributions are debited on time. In addition, there is the possibility to transfer contributions to an account.

Bank transfers from abroad may take some time. Companies need to take account of this when performing bank transfers. If the payment is not made on time penalty charges will be raised.

For each employee who is liable for compulsory insurance on 31 December of each year, an annual return must be produced with the first following wage and payroll accounting statement, at the latest by 15 February of the following year.

By means of the annual return, the employer informs the health insurance fund of the employee’s annual earnings, which were used to calculate the contribution. This value is forwarded by the health insurance company to the pension insurance institution responsible for the employee and will later be used as a basis for the calculation of the pension.