사회보험법상 중복급여의 조정 ― 사회보험급여와 근로소득을 중심으로 ―

Unemployment insurance, workers' compensation and old-age pension benefits serve all together the purpose of wage-loss protection because of unemployment, disability, advanced age or death. In many cases, an employee is eligible for other compensation or wage continuation benefits in addition to his or her workers' compensation entitlement. Employees who are eligible to receive compensation under the pension schemes may also be eligible to receive other compensation and benefits, such as disability benefits, unemployment benefits and other social security benefits. In order to prevent the beneficiaries from having to double-pay and prevent abuses of the system, Korean legislature enacted the coordination of benefits provision in the social security law. Coordination of benefits is necessary to prevent a person with duplicate coverage from profiting from his or her injury, invalidity, unemployment or death of his or her breadwinner. When two or more schemes cover a person, it is necessary to determine the order of benefits. Wage-loss benefit coordination laws are designed to achieve a dual purpose: (1) to assure, when an employee suffers a wage-loss because of unemployment, disability, advanced age or death, that a certain minimum portion of the employee's actual wages is continued or, in the case of death, that the employee's dependents receive some degree of recovery of lost support; and (2) to preclude an employee from contemporaneously collecting duplicative wage-loss benefits under different parts of the overall system of employment-based protection against loss of wages. The theory is that an employee experiencing only one wage loss should be entitled to receive only one wage-loss benefit from the social security system. There are several provisions in the social security law, which coordinates the duplicate coverage. Workers' compensation and pension schemes law have general coordination provisions, whereas unemployment insurance law has no such rules. Nevertheless, there is a special rule in unemployment insurance which excludes benefits when the beneficiaries of the unemployment benefits have the earned income during the unemployment period. The problem ist that there is presently no uniform rules, which deal with satisfactorily double coverage. Especially there are no rules in the invalidity pension which deal with the double pay both benefits and earned income. When reviewing coordination of benefits, legislators must determine what order of benefits determination rules appear in each liable scheme and which scheme is primary. In order that benefits be coordinated efficiently and fairly, legislators should create general guidelines for determining the order of benefit determination. The beneficiary should be compensated for his lost income, but must not receive more income than he would have normally received had he not been injured or unemployed.