What is MUFACE?

MUFACE is an acronym for the General State Civil Servant Mutual Society (Mutualidad de los Funcionarios Civiles del Estado in Spanish). It has its own system and organisation

The General State Civil Servant Mutual Society is a public organisation with independent public legal personality, which is responsible for processing everything related to the Social Security for civil servants

The points we will deal with in this article are:

• The system of administrative mutualism

• What is MUFACE?

• Organisation

The system of administrative mutualism

The Special Social Security scheme for State Civil Servants is governed by the provisions of Royal Legislative Decree 4/2000 of June 23, approving the revised text of the Act on the Social Security for State Civil Servants, and its application and development regulations, as well as by the legislation on State Pensioners.

This special regime is integrated by the following cover mechanisms:

• The State Pension System, in accordance with its specific regulations

• The System of Administrative Mutualism, which is regulated in the aforementioned Act

Nonetheless, career civil servants in the State Civil Administration who entered service from 1 January 2011, will be integrated into the General Social Security System for the exclusive purposes of pensions.

Thus, the civil servants that are included in the scope of application of this special System are the career civil servants of the State Civil Administration and the probationers who aspire to join one of the Corps, being excluded from this Special System:

1. a) Civil servants in Local Government.

2. b) Civil servants in autonomous organisations.

3. c) Civil servants in Military Administration.

4. d) Civil servants in the Justice Administration.

5. e) Civil servants in the Social Security Administration.

6. f) Newly incorporated civil servants and probationers in the Autonomous Communities.

7. g) Career civil servants in the State Civil Administration transferred to the Autonomous Communities, who have voluntarily entered or enter into that Autonomous Community's Body or scale, whatever the access system.

8. h) Administrative staff and services specific to universities.

What is MUFACE?

The General State Civil Servant Mutual Society is a public organisation with independent public legal personality, its own assets, treasury, and management autonomy.

To protect its collective of around 1,500,000 people, MUFACE manages a significant set of provisions, including healthcare; benefits for temporary disability, risk during pregnancy, or during natural breastfeeding; indemnities for permanent non-disabling injuries; and financial benefits for severe disability:

With regard to healthcare, including pharmaceuticals, MUFACE forms part of the National Health System in its capacity as a managing entity of the Special Social Security System for State Civil Servants. This healthcare is provided, according to the annual choice of the member, either in the public health system or through the free insurance organisations that have arranged this healthcare with the Mutual Society.

 Within the protection of the family, MUFACE grants its collective benefits for children or dependent minors with disability, as well as aid for the birth of a child or in the case of multiple births. The protective action of the Mutual society goes as far as social services and social assistance, providing grants for retirement or death (funeral), assistance in situations of special need, and so on.

Organisation

MUFACE is structured into the following bodies:

Participating in management control and monitoring.

• General Council

• Standing Committee of the General Council

• Provincial Committees

Direction and management.

The MUFACE General Management that assumes the legal representation of the Organisation, as well as the competencies of direction, coordination, management, and inspection of its activities to fulfil its purposes.

On a central level, the General Management is structured into the following units:

• General Secretary

• Department of Economic and Financial Management.

• Department of Healthcare Benefits.

• Department of Social Security Benefits.

• Participant's Office for the General State Administration Pension Plan.

• General Inspectorate.

• Support Unit.

In keeping with the fact the collective is distributed across the country, MUFACE has Provincial Services in each of the provinces, as well as Services in Ceuta and in Melilla. Mutual society members and their beneficiaries can get an immediate reply to their requests and enquiries from them, as they comprise an immediate link between MUFACE and its collective.

The director of the service, who represents MUFACE in the region, exercises the powers attributed to them or delegated by the General Management in matters such as membership of the mutual society or the recognition and payment of established benefits.

The Provincial Service of Madrid, which concentrates a high percentage (20%) of the total collective, also has Representative Offices. The directors of these have delegated responsibilities, analogous to those of the Provincial Services directors. Furthermore, because of this issue of concentration of the collective, two further Representative Offices were set up in Vigo and Santiago de Compostela that depend, respectively, on the Provincial Services of Pontevedra and A Coruña.

Personnel

The human resources that MUFACE relies on to fulfil its purposes constitute, according to data from the organisation's latest Annual Report (2016), 877 people. In the group of civil servants and employees, just over 70% provide peripheral services for the organisation and nearly 30% work in MUFACE central services.