Denmark’s pensions lobby this morning praised European Commission (EC) proposals to simplify the reporting burden placed on companies, and said the bloc’s pensions regulator as well as national supervisors should follow suit and aim for a 25% cut in the volume of red tape demanded.

EC president Ursula von der Leyen announced the drive at the European Parliament’s plenary on 15 March, saying that the Commission would look across departments to see which requirements actually made Europe more competitive and which ones the EC could do without.

“By the autumn we will put forward concrete proposals to simplify reporting requirements and in fact to reduce them by 25%,” she said.

The Danish industry association Insurance & Pension Denmark (IPD) said in a statement today that it backed the “ambitious plan” and acknowledged that the Commission was hereby starting a large and important piece of work.

Kent Damsgaard, chief executive officer of IPD, said: “We should avoid recipients drowning in volumes of worthless information, or businesses being faced with unnecessary administrative burdens.”

He added that it was crucial that business reporting provided value and necessary consumer information was available to give insurance and pension companies the basis on which to be able to invest long-term and responsibly.

The EC acknowledged in its communication of 16 March on the long-term competitiveness of the EU that reporting obligations entailed costs affecting small and medium-sized enterprises in particular.

It pledged to make “a fresh push” to rationalise and simplify reporting requirements for companies, with its first proposals for the environmental, digital and economic areas due to arrive before autumn.

The Danish pensions and insurance lobby group today also proposed that the focus on value creation and reducing reporting burdens by 25% should also be applied to reporting obligations from the European Supervisory Authority for Insurance and Occupational Pension Schemes (EIOPA), as well as to the national requirements that the sector adhered to.

Damsgaard said IPD was ready to contribute to the work of implementing the proposal, and said: “IPD calls on the Danish government to embrace this new initiative and begin work to find out which reporting that does not add value can be phased out.”

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Rachel is IPE's Nordic correspondent. She has long been a freelance writer, and over the years, has written for The Telegraph, The Independent, The Observer, AMWatch and elsewhere. In 2001, Rachel's personal finance book Kickstart Your Money was published by John Wiley & Sons.View full Profile

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