Certificate of Coverage

This will be the case if:

• The country where you will be working is in the European Union (EU) or the European Economic Area (EEA), or has a social security agreement with the Netherlands. 
• You are employed by a Dutch employer.
• Your employer continues to pay your wages.
• Your employer deducts social insurance contributions from your wages and pays these to the Dutch Tax Administration (Belastingdienst).
• You have the nationality of a country of the European Union (EU) or the European Economic Area (EEA) or of a country with which the Netherlands has a social security agreement.
• You were covered by compulsory insurance in the Netherlands for at least one month immediately prior to secondment.

You are required to take the Certificate with you on business trips. You need to show it in case of a control in foreign countries to avoid any trouble. For example, fines for the employer and/or employee or refusing the participation at the conference during your visit. Especially France, Austria, Greece, and Croatia make use of these controls and impose considerable fines. 

The requests for the certificate of coverage will be done by Arnold Harbers, as soon as he has received your business trip request (BTR). You will get a copy of the request and the original will be sent to the SVB (Sociale Verzekeringsbank). They will send the certificate to your home address. Sometimes, it will happen that the certificate has not arrived before you leave; then you can show them the request which verifies that the procedure is still pending.

Therefore, it is very important for us to receive you business trip requests as early as possible, and that we always have your correct home address in our personnel system. For filing in the request, we need to know the name and address of the organisation, institute, or conference place. 

The EU commission is planning to abolish the certificate of coverage for business trips. The decision is still pending and so for, we have to fill in the requests for the SVB Bank.

In order to avoid a lot of paperwork and time, the directorate decided to request for the certificate of coverage only for business trips to France, Austria, Greece, and Croatia where controls will probably still occur. For all other EEC and EEA countries the certificates will only be requested if the duration of the business trip is longer than one month.