The government has allocated 23 trillion rials ($850 million at official exchange rates) in the next year’s budget bill to settle the debts it holds to the Social Security Organization (SSO), the head of the organization said.
The government currently owes the organization 600 trillion rials ($22 billion), most of which were the debts the previous government were piling up, Naghi Nourbakhsh noted.
In 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to office, the government’s debts to the organization stood at 37 trillion rials ($1.35 billion). The debts became nearly sixteen times as more when he was leaving office in 2013, according to ISNA.
Nourbakhsh admitted that it is not logically feasible to repay such massive debts in the course of a year or so, since President Hassan Rouhani has taken office. “However, the Rouhani administration would continue to repay parts of them each year.”
