European coordination of social security: rules for determination the applicable legislation

The aim of this master thesis is to analyse practical impacts of special rules for determination of applicable legislation in accordance with the Regulation No. 883/2004 and its implementing Regulation No. 987/2009. Further the thesis seeks to identify potential negative effects connected to application of the single insurance principle as well as deficiencies arising out of practical performance of European coordination and to discuss the eventual solutions to undesirable effects caused by weak sides of coordination regulations. The thesis is divided into four chapters: an introduction is followed by a chapter about general principles of European coordination of social security systems and about current developments in this field. The topic of a second part is an institute of posting according to Art. 12 of the Regulation No. 883/2004, a distinction here is made between employees and self-employed persons. This chapter further contains procedural rules and an overview of issued portable documents A1 (E 101 forms) during the years 2009 - 2011. Third chapter deals with pursuit of activities in two or more Member States in accordance to Art. 13 of the Regulation No. 883/2004. Special attention is paid to a fine line between posting and pursuit of activities. A problem with retroactive determination of applicable legislation is discussed in the last subchapter of the thesis. This problem is being recently solved by Czech institutions and employers. They are trying to find a solution preventing negative consequences of such a retroactive determination. Exception governed in Art. 16 of the Regulation No. 883/2004 is a subject of the fourth chapter. Situations where an exception is a possible and suitable solution are presented here as well as statistics about requests for exemption from Czech resp. foreign laws.