M. Emin Zararsız, the head of the Social Security Institution (SGK), speaking at a press conference yesterday in Ankara, said that the system will be introduced at midnight on May 16 and the first two weeks, until June 1, will be a transition period. However, he added, after this date, no pharmaceuticals without a 2D barcode will be sold. Currently all pharmacies are ready to adopt the system, said Zararsız. The requirements will be implemented under the Health Ministry’s drug tracking system (İTS), according to which each pharmaceutical will have an ID number that will allow the item to be tracked from production to consumption.Zararsız also gave a briefing on work by the SGK to fight unregistered employment. A total of 438,338 people were determined to have been working in the unregistered economy since June 2008, while 10,763 firms were found to be operating illegally during this period, he said. “According to Turkish Statistics Institute [TurkStat] data, the unregistered employment rate is currently at 43 percent. Though this figure is quite high, we can see that our fight has started to bear fruit considering that more than 52.8 percent of people were working without being registered with the SGK in 2001. Even during the global financial crisis, the unregistered employment rate did not increase significantly, which signifies the efficiency of the measures taken to combat the unregistered economy,” Zararsız said.
The SGK signed protocols and agreements with nearly 20 institutions, including public establishments and banks, to cooperate in determining who was working informally and which firms were operating illegally in 2008 and 2009, Zararsız stated. He added that this had also contributed much toward the war against the unregistered economy. Furthermore, he said, offices for the Fight Against the Unregistered Employment Project (KADİM) had been established in every city in Turkey.
