If the employee leaves the management company before retirement, discretionary pension benefits shall be held by the management company for a period of five years in the form of instruments referred to in point (m).

4. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to grant migrant and frontier workers easier access to information on the tax treatment of cross-border occupational pension schemes; considers that such information should be provided within the framework of EURES, inter alia; calls for the EURES network to be strengthened to enable those tasks to be carried out more effectively;

"pre-retirement benefit" means: all cash benefits, other than an unemployment benefit or an early old-age benefit, provided from a specified age to workers who have reduced, ceased or suspended their remunerative activities until the age at which they qualify for an old-age pension or an early retirement pension, the receipt of which is not conditional upon the person concerned being available to the employment services of the competent State; "early old-age benefit" means a benefit provided before the normal pension entitlement age is reached and which either continues to be provided once the said age is reached or is replaced by anoth ...[+++]er old-age benefit;

v ) "pre-retirement benefits' means all cash benefits, other than an unemployment benefit or an early old-age benefit, provided from a specified age to workers who have reduced, ceased or suspended their remunerative activities until the age at which they qualify for an old-age pension or an early retirement pension, the receipt of which is not conditional upon the person involved being available to the employment services of the competent State; "early old-age benefit" means a benefit provided before the normal pension entitlement age required is reached and which either continues to be provided once the said age is reached or is repla ...[+++]ced by another old-age benefit;

(s) "pre-retirement benefits" mean: all cash benefits, other than an unemployment benefit or an early old-age benefit, provided from a specified age to workers who have reduced, ceased or suspended their remunerative activities until the age at which they qualify for an old-age pension or an early retirement pension, the receipt of which is not conditional upon the person involved being available to the employment services of the competent State; "early old-age benefit" means a benefit provided before the normal pension entitlement age required is reached and which either continues to be provided once the said age is reached or is repla ...[+++]ced by another old-age benefit;

Subsection 235. 2(b), which this bill would rescind states: An employer shall be deemed not to have terminated the employment of an employee where, either immediately on ceasing to be employed by the employer or before that time, the employee is entitled to a pension, under a pension plan contributed to by the employer- In practice this means that if a company is laying off workers, it is not obliged to pay severance to older workers who are entitled to early withdrawal of pension benefits, even though they may be severely penalized for taking benefits before the normal pensionable age.