45In addition, the additional pension scheme for Members shares a key characteristic with the pension scheme for European officials. Indeed, the officials’ pension scheme follows in principle a capitalisation model which could be classed as a ‘virtual’ fund scheme, since, although, in reality, the contributions of those officials feed into the budget of the European Union, no employer contributions are in fact paid and the expenditure related to the payment of pensions under that scheme is covered by that budget, the actuarial balance of the scheme is calculated as if there were a pension fund. This means, in particular, that the combined total of the annual contributions made by a European official and the hypothetical employer contribution must correspond to the actuarial value of the pension rights acquired by that official in the same year, an essential feature of a ‘funded’ pension scheme. Accordingly, the characteristics of the pension scheme for European officials are very similar to those of the additional pension scheme for Members, since the two systems specify an actuarial calculation as part of which the annual contribution must correspond to one third of the pension rights acquired in the same year (with the employer contribution, in this case the contribution from the Parliament, covering the remaining two thirds).