2023-05-30 04:38:05
“A decree will be taken by this summer”. The government wants to move quickly: as Gabriel Attal explains to the Parisian, the government will “carry out a program to control pensioners over 85 abroad”, mainly those living outside Europe, ie approximately 500,000 people. Within the European Union, the situation is easier, because “the exchange of information on civil status is automatic”, details the Minister of Action and Public Accounts.
“It is obviously not for us to stigmatize anyone, but to act,” explains Gabriel Attal. Concretely, this will go through appointments set in the consulates or local banks with which we work. And the Minister also mentioned “biometrics, thanks to the launch of a facial recognition application which will make it possible to recognize the person. And to take the measure of the efforts to be made, Gabriel Attal returns to the controllers sent to Algiers last fall. “Out of 1,000 “almost centenarian” retirees, 300 non-compliant files were identified,” he says.
This problem is not new, since as of 2020, the Court of Auditors recognized in a report that “the actions implemented (…) insufficiently cover the risk of unjustified continuation of the payment of benefits to insured persons residing abroad and whose death has not been reported by their relatives or is concealed by sending unjustified or falsified certificates of existence”.
Investigators in embassies
Faced with these fraudulent declarations which have clearly taken place, the government wishes to implement new methods of control. Until now, pensioners residing abroad each year had to send the State a “life certificate”, a procedure accessible online.
According to latest figures released by the National Old Age Insurance Fund (CNAV), in 2022, 1,087,595 retirees lived abroad out of the 15,049,171 receiving a CNAV pension, i.e. 7.2% of beneficiaries. The most represented countries of residence are Algeria (341,184), Portugal (163,850), Spain (157,074), Italy (65,829) and Morocco (60,864).
The marginal case of centenarians abroad
A controversy erupted in December 2019, after RN MP Gilbert Collard said on LCI that pension fraud was costing France dearly due to “immortal pensioners. All these retirees who live thanks to our pensions until they are 105, 110, that’s 6.5 billion”. Figures far removed from reality, since these centenarians, numbering 1,717 in 2019, represented less than 0.02% of all people receiving a pension and residing abroad.
All the amounts affected then amounted to 6.8 million euros for the year 2019, a small amount compared to the more than 4 billion paid by pension insurance (i.e. 3.2% of the total) to 1.2 million pensioners residing abroad. The proportion of centenarians among retirees living abroad also remained similar to that observed in the population in France.
“In addition, it happens in certain cases that the very high, if not improbable, ages of certain insured persons reflect old errors in entering their identification data”, noted the Court of Auditors in its report.
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