national pension woes

My previous job, the one I had before coming to Smoo, was at a hagweon* (an extracurricular institute; in this case, a language institute) in Kangnam, the rich part of Seoul that is, as the Korean name implies, south of the river (gang = river; nam = south). I had thought that obtaining the roughly $1200 I am owed in national pension would be a cinch, but as I found out yesterday (Thursday), because I had a different foreign resident's ID back then, matters weren't so simple.

I walked into the National Pension Office with all my documents at the ready-- plane ticket, old bankbooks, passport, alien registration card, and the 10- or 15-page form I was required to fill out (well, not every page: only 6 or 7 pages). I quickly learned, though, that my current foreign resident's ID provided no access to my payment records from 2004 to 2005. That was the first obstacle.

So I had to call the office of my former employer, but since I didn't have the number, I had to ask the National Pension Office employee to track the number down via Internet and give it to me (she wasn't willing to do this at first). I called my branch and was told to call the guy who hired me, Bob, at a different branch. Bob turned out to be quite helpful (I'd been dealing with buck-passing all Thursday, so this was a relief); he was able to track down my old foreign resident's ID and give it to me. I thanked Bob, hung up, and relayed the number to the lady across the desk from me.

Second obstacle: the lady punched in my old number and found my records, only to discover that I had no pension funds, which looked suspiciously as though my old hagweon had decided not to fulfill its end of the contract. By law, a teacher is supposed to pay about $100 per month into the pension fund; while a university might have its own (stingy) pension plan, a hagweon is supposed to match the employee's payment, meaning that I should have had about $200 per month stored up in pension funds for this job. Having worked at the job for a little over six months, I should have had about $1200 or so stored up. This was the money I was hoping to have sent to my US account.

So I called Bob again and told him the situation. He said he'd have to dig around a bit and discover what was going on, and that I should call him the following morning.

So that's where we're at with national pension. It's entirely possible that my previous place of employment has somehow skunked me on this. Even though my own personal payment records show that my ex-employers did deduct pension from my pay, the National Pension Office has no records of such funds. This whole mess is one huge mystery. We'll know more in a few hours. Yeesh.

---

*"Hagweon" is often annoyingly mispronounced by English-speaking foreigners as a drawled "haah-gwaaahn." More properly, it's "hah-gweon," with the "eo" in "gweon" being somewhere between an American English "aw" (as in "saw") and an American English "uh" (as in "fun"). The entire word should be pronounced with a certain tightness in the speech organs, and should be spoken briskly, not drawled with lazily protracted vowels.


_