A few days ago I received an envelope with 3 letters from Pension Office.
2 forms
* 届出はお済みですか (国民年金加入のご案内 — Have you filed your registration yet? (National Pension Plan Enrollment Information
* 國民年金被保険者關係届書(申出書) — National Pension Insured Relationships (Application)
1 information flyer
* 知っていますか? 国民年金保険料の免除制度— Did you know about this? National Pension Insurance Premium Exemption System
Basically, it is a notification saying the Pension Office does not have information about 10 recent years of my enrollment in the pension system. That said, it is not surprising as I started to live in Japan in May and previously paid a pension in my home country. Currently, I am a full-time employee of a local company.
To gather more relevant info, I logged in to the MyNa portal to overview Nenkin data. It has a table that correctly shows recent months of employment preceding by many lines with with a following pattern: 平成27年度（N歳）未確定.
I have chatted with HR and seems they will not be able to help because they can not contact the pension office on my behalf. So, here I am, gathering advice before going to the office. What is your experience? Does this mail indicate that I am obliged to pay all 未確定 months?
PS: I have found an old post with a similar topic [https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/4ko36a/letter\_from\_pension\_office\_%E5%B1%8A%E5%87%BA%E3%81%AF%E3%81%8A%E6%B8%88%E3%81%BF%E3%81%A7%E3%81%99%E3%81%8B/](https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/comments/4ko36a/letter_from_pension_office_%E5%B1%8A%E5%87%BA%E3%81%AF%E3%81%8A%E6%B8%88%E3%81%BF%E3%81%A7%E3%81%99%E3%81%8B/) but it looks like the input conditions are different.
3 comments
You need to tell them you just started living in Japan. There’s a form that says this. Any city hall can help.
Your company should have registered you on the employee pension and be contributing a certain amount as well. It is actually their responsibility to register you and make sure the local pension office knows you are paying employee pension. However, my company messed up the registration and I ended up getting hounded like you. In actual fact, your HR is just being lazy. They can investigate further on your behalf although you will have to contact the National Pension and iron things out. My company HR was super helpful but it was a real mess. The different local pension offices do not communicate with each other. In my case, it was a mistake with my name. If you do have to enroll in the National Pension for whatever reason, such as when you are working freelance, they will backdate but they can only backdate about 3 years. They are quite aggressive and will often hire public companies to chase the money on their behalf. I would compare the level of aggression with that of a credit card company. You can often negotiate to pay in monthly instalments and sometimes you can wind down the clock a bit to reduce the amount you have to pay. Basically each payment has an expiry which gets closer with every passing month. It is worth noting that paying pension without any gaps for 3 years is a requirement of PR.
Are you new to Japan? When you register your address, they send you documents to join the pension system. They’ll also ask you to pay back payments from when you were 20 until now, but it’s not mandatory (my first workplace here asked me, and I declined).
Also, if you sent immigration info that you ended a job, you may get documents from the government to enroll in national pension on your own, since they aren’t sure if you left because you’re joining a new company or not.
Check the pension number on any documents they give you. I got pension notices after I started my new job, and it turns out that my HR accidentally registered for a new pension account for me (old one did not have middle name, new one included middle name). Got lots of documents for both pension numbers, one saying I missed payments and one asking for back payments. Took months to sort out between work and the pension office.