Cushioning the consequences of the corona pandemic is expensive. The Federal Employment Agency alone had to put billions on the table. The cushion from better times has long been used up. The Federal Employment Agency has put its previous expenses for the Corona crisis at the immense sum of around 52 billion euros.
In 2020 and 2021, 24 billion euros in short-time work benefits, 18 billion euros for social benefits from short-time work and ten billion euros for pandemic-related unemployment benefits, said BA board member Christiane Schönefeld in Berlin. “That overshadowed everything that we had known up until then,” emphasized Schönefeld. At its peak, as much was paid out in one day as in the whole of 2019. At that time, the budget was € 157 million.
To finance the additional expenses, the Federal Agency’s reserves of almost 26 billion euros, which had been accumulated over the years, were almost completely used up, said Schönefeld. “We had imagined that we would be able to finance any crisis from this reserve.” It should turn out differently: the federal government had to contribute around 24 billion euros. The rest was covered from the budget.
There is also a gap in the next budget for 2022. The Federal Agency assumes that it will need around one billion federal grants. Expenditure is expected to fall from a forecast 58 billion euros for 2021 to 38 billion euros next year. Two billion euros alone are to be spent on further training in order to get people into higher-skilled jobs.
Only 1.7 billion euros are planned for short-time working in the next budget, after 22 billion in the previous year. The BA budget is usually fed almost exclusively from premium income. For the next year, 37 billion euros are expected.
Schönefeld admitted that a further pandemic-related lockdown with then possibly a new surge in short-time work would increase the deficit. If it remains that the pandemic is to be fought largely with the means of access restrictions for unvaccinated people, the approach could be sufficient.