Improper payments and “badly unpaid” benefits: the family branch of Social Security spent close to six billion euros in profits and losses in 2022, according to the Court of Auditors, which on Tuesday refused to certify the last financial year.
The sentence is severe, the sentence final. The amount of the accounting “errors” of the family branch and its armed wing, the National Family Allowance Fund (Cnaf), increased again in 2022, reaching 5,800 million euros, a sum that includes times the amounts improperly paid and the that should have been paid to the insured. This figure partly covers fraud, estimated at 2,800 million in 2021 by the Cnaf, which will not update this assessment until next year.
This sum of “errors”, which “represents 7.6% of the amount of benefits” paid last year, is permanently lost for Social Security or for certain applicants for RSA, activity bonus or housing assistance, whose inaccurate statements date back more than 24 months. “it will never be regularized”, underlines the Court of Accounts.
“Advances” in Fraud Detection
Considering this amount “too high” and deploring the absence of “actions to correct the situation in the short term”, the institution “refuses to certify the accounts” and “appeals to CNAF to expand its efforts.” Its director, Nicolas Grivel, does not question this decision. On the contrary, “we agree on the figures”, he declared, explaining the situation by “a hyper-complex service system” and a succession of events (Covid, APL reform, etc.) that “blew up the error indicators”.
But the actions “are already underway,” he added, with initial results on “targeting controls” and the fight against fraud. And the gradual implementation of “solidarity at the source”, with, in particular, a “prior declaration of resources”, should ultimately make it possible to “significantly reduce the risk” of errors, according to him. The other branches of Social Security are improving, with validation subject to change. Health insurance still shows an error rate of around 10% in reimbursements for health costs and work stoppages, totaling around 3.8 billion euros.
However, the Court welcomes the “advances” in the detection of fraud, since several specific studies (nurses, general practitioners, physiotherapists, etc.) have made it possible to reach a range of 900 to 1.3 billion euros, in a scope that is not exhaustive. The Old Age Insurance for its part appraises the “fraud damages” at only 200 million euros, a result “that must be taken with caution” according to the Court. It also points out that one new retiree in seven continues to receive a pension “affected by at least one error” in the calculation.
Source: BFM TV
