Secu: the Court of Auditors pins the family branch for “far too high” accounting errors

2023-05-17 04:19:41

The sentence is without appeal. The Court of Auditors refused on Tuesday to certify the accounts of the family branch of Social Security, which spent nearly six billion euros in losses and profits in 2022. The amount of accounting “errors” of the family branch and its armed wing, the National Family Allowance Fund (Cnaf), increased again last year, reaching 5.8 billion euros, a sum which includes both the amounts wrongly paid and those which should have been paid to policyholders. This figure partly covers that of fraud, estimated at 2.8 billion 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 definitively lost for Social Security or for certain applicants for RSA, activity bonus or housing aid , whose inaccurate declarations dating back more than 24 months “will never be regularized”, underlines the Court of Auditors.

“A hypercomplex service system”

Deeming this amount “far too high” and deploring the absence of “actions to rectify the situation in the short term”, the institution “refuses to certify the accounts” and “calls on the Cnaf to amplify its efforts”. Its director, Nicolas Grivel, does not dispute this decision. On the contrary, “we agree on the figures”, he declared, explaining the situation by “a hypercomplex system of services” and a succession of events (Covid, reform of the APL, etc.) which “have made explode the error indicators”.

But actions “are already underway”, he added, with initial results on the “targeting of controls” and the fight against fraud. And the gradual implementation of “solidarity at the source”, with in particular a “pre-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 doing better, with validation subject to change. Health insurance still shows an error rate of around 10% on reimbursements of health costs and work stoppages, for a total of around 3.8 billion euros. However, the Court welcomes “progress” in the detection of fraud, several targeted studies (nurses, general practitioners, physiotherapists, etc.) having made it possible to arrive at a range of 0.9 to 1.3 billion euros, on a perimeter not yet comprehensive.

The Old Age Insurance for its part assesses the “damage of fraud” at only 200 million euros, a result “to be considered with caution” according to the Court. It also notes that one new retiree in seven still receives a pension “affected by at least one error” in calculation.