In 2014 nearly 30,000 people kept being paid their pension after death
Spain’s Court of Accounts warns that Social Security checks are inadequate: the cost of pension payments to deceased individuals amounts to €350m per year
BarcelonaIn Spain a total of 29,321 deceased people —a figure close to the number of residents in a town the size of Sitges— kept being paid their pension in 2014, an expense that amounted to nearly €25.5m per month. That is the figure provided by the Court of Accounts in its survey for 2014, where data were cross-referenced in an unprecedented way: the number of deaths registered between 1987 and 2015 was matched against the public pension pay roll from December 2014 to October 2015.
The data led the oversight body to draw a clear conclusion: there are “lapses” and “inadequacies” in the checks performed by Spain’s Social Security on deceased pensioners, which “must be addressed”. For that reason, yesterday the Court of Accounts suggested a number of improvements to avoid paying pensions to individuals who are actually dead. The report shows how from 2012 to 2014 these “lapses” in the system prevented the administration from claiming back €10.28m worth of undue monies, as the payments had already prescribed.
There is one single cause behind it all: “the Social Security lacks a system to check that the beneficiary of a pension is still alive”, the report claims. In other words, the inadequacies are due to the lack of information about deaths sent to three bodies: Spain’s National Social Security Institute, the General Board of Registrars and Notaries and the National Statistics Institute. “There is no guarantee that a deceased pensioner can be removed from the system with the information currently available”, says the Court.
The answer: three filters
To solve the problem and put a stop to the €350m that these “inadequacies” amount to every year, on Friday the Court of Accounts advised Spain’s Social Security to follow its lead and sort the names of the deceased featured in the Employment Office’s database and match them against those listed in the Social Security records.
But the Court suggests taking things a step further and it states that banks should be urged to monitor whether old age pensioners are alive or not, because —until now— “banks with OAP account holders do not run systematic checks on this point”, the report stresses. Ultimately, the Court advises a third filter: provincial authorities should gather evidence that every OAP is alive at least three times a year.
The Court of Accounts stresses that the figures “are obviously rather alarming for the the administration” and, therefore, “a full review is in order”.
The Court’s warning comes at a time when the Social Security is under financial stress, has slipped into the red and is having to use the reserve fund to meet pension payments. Only this month, the reserve fund has shrunk by €9.7bn so that payments of income tax rebates and the summer extra pay could be met.
