The impact of the covid-19 pandemic encompassed all spheres of reality, including economic, forcing the temporary cessation of the activity of a vast majority of companiesleaving numerous unemployed workers and forcing recourse to a emergency resource how were the temporary employment regulation files (erte) to avoid the economic collapse of an endless number of Spanish homes.
But such was the flood of ertes, that the Public State Employment Service (SEPE), dependent on Ministry of Labor, had to approve payments without real options to check each file, given the urgent need to facilitate the payment of income to workers who had temporarily stayed without resources. And as a consequence, faced with this administrative chaos forced by unforeseen circumstances, hundreds of thousands of those ertes were paid with errors, triggering a subsequent cataract of claims for improper payments.
Alluvium
The summer of 2020, with a little margin to have checked files, was the moment in which SEPE began to try to correct those errors claiming to the recipients of the benefits to which amounts of more had been paid the return of those amounts that exceeded the correct figure. And despite the fact that neither the total amount of money claimed nor the affected receptors for wrong payments, The number of claims made has been revealed.
A total of 1,275,196 claims of undue collections were registered in the whole of last year, more than triple the 400,000 initially foreseen, according to what is clear from the General State Budgets. And if the 1,410,120 claims expected for the current year are added to that figure, the total will rise to 2.7 million, and more than 3.2 million when adding the 579,127 made in 2020. For next year the SEPE It foresees around half a million more, so that the total number could exceed 3.7 million claims originating from improper payments in the four years of the pandemic.
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However, not all SEPE claims refer to erte, since they also include total unemployment benefits. And in this sense, the maximum level of workers in erte in the pandemic was 3.6 million workers, at a time when Labor lay off about 1,500 interim employees incorporated in 2020 to meet the needs of the service with more guarantees: close to 8 million unemployment renewals and registrations of claimants in 2020, 5 million in 2021, 4 million in 2022 and around 4.2 million expected for the year comes.
Figures to which must be added management controls and claims: almost 9 million from 2020 to 2022 and 5.5 million recognitions of online services during confinement and just over 5 million last year. A barrage of work that illustrates the reasons why the SEPE has been led into a situation of chaos in recent times.