Insurance number
The pension insurance number (RVNR) is a code consisting of letters and numbers to identify insured persons in the statutory pension insurance of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The social security card contains the pension insurance number according to Section 18h (1) SGB IV . The (pension) insurance number is not identical to the health insurance number of the statutory health insurance .
General
The insurance number was introduced in 1964 together with electronic data processing by the statutory pension insurance providers. Legal basis was first a General Administrative Regulation of the Federal . In 1967 the use of the insurance number was regulated in the Reich Insurance Code. In 1992 the regulation in the Social Security Code, which is still valid today, followed .
The insurance number is assigned by the German pension insurance providers . The allocation takes place ex officio if a person receives an insurance account in the statutory pension insurance . Each person receives an individual insurance number and generally keeps it for their entire life.
From June 1, 2005, as part of the introduction of an individual national health insurance number based on the encrypted pension insurance number, an RV number will be assigned to every member of the statutory health insurance. This means that in the future, newborns will receive an RV number. For this group of people, however , the social security card is only issued when they first take up employment.
It is necessary to assign an insurance number to all citizens due to the introduction of the electronic health card , which should be gradually introduced into the statutory health insurance from January 1, 2006 .
purpose
Similar to a file number, the insurance number serves as an identification and classification feature. In contrast to a file number, however, it is characterized by two special features:
- The insurance number never changes; it accompanies the insured throughout his life.
- Conclusions about certain characteristics of the insured can be drawn from the number itself.
construction
Structure of the digits from the area number to the serial number
The structure of the insurance number is stipulated by law in Section 147 of Book Six of the Social Security Code . The details are regulated in § 2 of the regulation on the insurance number, account management and insurance history in the statutory pension insurance . The pension insurance institutions must not deviate from these stipulations.
The insurance number always has twelve digits. Example: 15070649C103 . It is made up as follows:
| Job | meaning | example |
| 1-2 | Area number of the pension insurance carrier | 15th |
| 3-4 | Birthday of the insured | 07 |
| 5-6 | Month of birth of the insured person | 06 |
| 7-8 | Year of birth of the insured person | 49 |
| 9 | First letter of the insured person's maiden name | C. |
| 10-11 | Serial number (00–49 = male, 50–99 = female or undetermined gender) | 10 |
| 12 | Check digit | 3 |
Umlauts at the beginning of the name at birth are resolved, foreign-language special characters are replaced by comparable German letters, and lower-case letters are converted into upper-case letters. In the meantime, letters that differ from the birth name are also used.
In the rare event that more than 50 people with the same first letter of the surname were born on the same day under an area number, the date of birth of the insured person is provided with an offset, which leads to a value outside the usual date specifications. B. 32.
The area number of the pension fund can be assigned as follows:
| Area number | Pension insurance agency by region or area |
| 02 | German Pension Insurance North (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania) |
| 03 | German Pension Insurance Central Germany (Thuringia) |
| 04 | German Pension Insurance Berlin-Brandenburg (Brandenburg) |
| 08 | German Pension Insurance in Central Germany (Saxony-Anhalt) |
| 09 | German Pension Insurance Central Germany (Saxony) |
| 10 | German Pension Insurance Braunschweig-Hannover (Hannover) |
| 11 | German Pension Insurance Westphalia |
| 12 | German Pension Insurance Hessen |
| 13 | German Pension Insurance Rhineland (Rhine Province) |
| 14th | German Pension Insurance Bavaria South (Upper Bavaria) |
| 15th | German Pension Insurance Bavaria South (Niederbayern-Oberpfalz) |
| 16 | German pension insurance Rhineland-Palatinate |
| 17th | German pension insurance Saarland |
| 18th | German Pension Insurance North Bavaria (Upper and Middle Franconia) |
| 19th | German Pension Insurance North (Hamburg) |
| 20th | German Pension Insurance North Bavaria (Lower Franconia) |
| 21st | German pension insurance Swabia |
| 23 | German Pension Insurance Baden-Württemberg (Württemberg) |
| 24 | German Pension Insurance Baden-Württemberg (Baden) |
| 25th | German Pension Insurance Berlin-Brandenburg (Berlin) |
| 26th | German Pension Insurance North (Schleswig-Holstein) |
| 28 | German pension insurance Oldenburg-Bremen |
| 29 | German Pension Insurance Braunschweig-Hannover (Braunschweig) |
| 38 | Deutsche Rentenversicherung Knappschaft-Bahn-See (railway sector) |
| 39 | Deutsche Rentenversicherung Knappschaft-Bahn-See (maritime sector) |
| 40 | Central allowance office for retirement assets ( allowance number according to § 90 I 2 EStG) |
| 42-79 | German Federal Pension Insurance (area number corresponds to the area number of the area of the regional institution and adding the number 40) |
| 80 | German pension insurance Knappschaft-Bahn-See (Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein) |
| 81 | German Pension Insurance Knappschaft-Bahn-See (Hesse and Rhine Province) |
| 82 | German pension insurance Knappschaft-Bahn-See (Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland) |
| 89 | German pension insurance Knappschaft-Bahn-See (Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Thuringia) |
When issuing insurance numbers, it is possible to deduce from the area number to which pension insurance institution the insurance number was assigned at the time it was assigned; However, since the account manager - the responsible pension insurance agency - can change over time without the number being adjusted, it is not possible to derive the currently responsible pension insurance agency from the insurance number. However, the insured person must be informed about the allocation and allocation.
The fictitious example mentioned is a male insured person born on June 7, 1949, whose maiden name begins with C and whose insurance number was assigned by the Deutsche Rentenversicherung for the Niederbayern-Oberpfalz region.
Calculation of the check digit
The check digit is calculated as follows:
The twelfth digit, the check digit, is calculated by replacing the letter in the ninth digit with a two-digit number that indicates the position of the letter in the German alphabet. The digits of the twelve-digit number are multiplied by the factors 2, 1, 2, 5, 7, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 and 1 starting at the first place. The cross sum is formed from the products and the cross sums are added to a number. This number modulo 10 results in the last digit of this sum (on the right, representing the ones), it is the check digit.
modification
Every person basically keeps the insurance number that has been assigned to them by the pension insurance company.
A change occurs if a number has accidentally been assigned more than once. In this case, all affected persons will receive new insurance numbers and the old numbers will no longer apply. If a person accidentally has multiple insurance numbers, all but one will be shut down.
The insurance number can be changed on request if the registered date of birth turns out to be incorrect (Section 33a SGB I ) or the insured person has a change of first name or civil status carried out in accordance with the Transsexual Act or PStG 45b. However, a prerequisite for the change due to an incorrect date of birth is the submission of a confirming document that was created before applying for the insurance number. Corresponding case law of the Federal Social Court , also against foreign insured persons, has been confirmed by the European Court of Justice (B 13 RJ 31/96 R of February 17, 1998, 8 KN 7/95 of March 31, 1998; C-211/98, C-102 / 98).
Usage Restrictions
The insurance number may only be used by the pension insurance funds. Other social insurance carriers ( health insurance companies , long-term care insurance companies and accident insurance institutions ), authorities and companies may only use the number in certain, legally clearly defined cases. However, this has not always been the case.
Development and Background
Initially, the pension insurance number was also used by other data processing agencies, in particular by the health insurance companies. Many authorities and employers use the insurance number as a classification and identification feature. The pension insurance number has been more and more of a general personal identifiers . With their help, one could have merged the personal data stored at the various offices into an overall picture of the person. This overall picture would have become more detailed, the more digits had used the insurance number as a personal identifier. In the end, there might have been a perfect personality profile.
This development was halted in 1983 by the Federal Constitutional Court . In the so-called census judgment, the court found, among other things, that a uniform personal identifier, which enables citizens to be comprehensively registered and cataloged by merging various databases, is incompatible with the conception of man in the Basic Law and is therefore unconstitutional.
The legislature was thus indirectly asked to regulate the use of the insurance number more strictly. A total ban was out of the question for practical reasons: the social security agencies were dependent on electronic data processing and thus on personal identification numbers, and the employers had to transmit the data of their employees in such a way that they could be processed sensibly and unbureaucratically by the social insurance agencies. In this area of tension between data protection and efficient data processing, the legislator decided in 1988/1989 to compromise with the introduction of Sections 18f and 18g in Book Four of the Social Code and the new version of Section 290 in Book Five of the Social Code .
Legal position
Special regulations
Since 1989 the insurance number can only be used with restrictions and under certain conditions.
The social insurance agencies , the Federal Employment Agency , the artists' social insurance fund and certain pension funds may continue to use the insurance number relatively freely, provided this is necessary for the personal assignment of the data and for the fulfillment of the social insurance tasks. There is only one restriction for the health insurance companies: Since 1992 they are no longer allowed to use the pension insurance number as a health insurance number.
Other social administration agencies, for example the social welfare agencies , the main customs offices and the associations of statutory health insurance physicians , are only allowed to use the insurance number to transmit data to the social insurance agencies and agencies mentioned above. The same applies to all other authorities, courts, employers or other third parties. These bodies are prohibited from using the insurance number to organize their files or to make them accessible. This also applies if the person concerned consents to its use. Such consent would be ineffective.
For example, an employer is allowed to save the pension insurance number of its employee in order to transmit this together with other personal data to the collection point of the social security. Otherwise, the collection agency might have difficulties assigning the data to a specific insured person. However, the employer may not use the insurance number as a personnel number at the same time.
Despite this clear legal prohibition, the insurance number was still used for other purposes after 1989. The main association of commercial trade associations saved the insurance number in a central occupational disease database until 1995 , although the association had been advised of the inadmissibility of saving it as early as 1993. The Federal Commissioner for Data Protection then formally reprimanded this deliberate violation of the law. Since 1997, the use of the insurance number by the employers' liability insurance association has been regulated in detail in the Seventh Book of the Social Code - Statutory Accident Insurance .
General regulation
Since the insurance number contains personal information about the insured person , it is a personal social date . It is therefore subject to social secrecy . This means that the use of the insurance number is also subject to the data protection restrictions of the Tenth Book of the Social Security Code .
See also
- In Switzerland, the insurance number is called the AHV number (French: NSS, numéro de sécurité sociale), see old-age and survivors' insurance # AHV number .
- Social security number , general description for different states
- Company number to identify employers with social security in Germany