2023-12-24 09:20:07
Almost four years have passed since Covid burst into our lives and the Government deployed ERTE (temporary suspensions of employment) to protect workers, who could collect unemployment benefits during the months that their companies remained closed or at half throttle. The memory is now distant but the State Public Employment Service (SEPE) has revived it to almost 15,000 Basques to whom it has sent letters to claim the excess benefits collected in those files due to errors in their communication and processing.
Noelia, a dental hygienist, is one of them. «I have received a letter in which they demand that I return 390 euros for ‘improper receipt of unemployment benefits.’ Apparently it is because of the ERTE in which we spent a month and a half as soon as the pandemic broke out. It has also reached other colleagues at the dental clinic where I work,” she explains. In the case of Juan, a Binter Canarias pilot, things are more serious because they are demanding more than 4,000 euros for the same concept.
In total, according to the data to which EL CORREO has had access, the SEPE has opened 16,781 files for this reason in Euskadi for a total of 14,781 beneficiaries. The amount claimed amounts to almost 14 million euros, which gives an average of 944 euros.
The reason there are so many files is that during the pandemic, the order was given to speed up the ERTE procedures as much as possible so that workers could collect unemployment benefits as soon as possible. The situation was a maximum emergency, unprecedented, and there was a great collapse in public organizations. We have never suffered a pandemic of this caliber before. There was no precedent to rely on and make decisions.
«Priority was given to speed at the expense of accuracy, aware that refinements would have to be made afterwards. The important thing was that the workers’ income was not affected and we managed to get the benefit to them in a very short period of time,” argues Denis Itxaso, delegate of the central government in the Basque Country. “The volume of work was extraordinary with a very high number of beneficiaries and for this reason, files are currently still being purged,” he adds.
Urgency
It is worth remembering that in Euskadi there were 200,000 workers in ERTE in the spring of the pandemic. It was a tool that already existed in labor legislation, but was adapted to the circumstances with the so-called ‘ERTE covid’ or force majeure, which could be processed in five days and allowed companies to exempt Social Security contributions.
The regulations that regulated them came out on March 18, 2020 and their management posed an enormous challenge for companies. «We had to process an emergency ERTE for 90% of our clients. “It was a race against time,” they remember at the Algorta Consulting. «At that time the SEPE did not even allow you to make rectifications. It was chaos. That’s why complaints are coming in now. Public organizations have four years to regularize payments. Social Security is also refining the contribution bases of that time,” explains Guillermo Gumb, president of the College of Social Graduates of Bizkaia and partner of the Estudio Jurídico firm.
The claims are due to different reasons such as having continued to pay the benefit to a worker who had already left the ERTE, subsequent regularization of the days affected by the file, adaptation of the working day percentages…
The SEPE gives a period of 10 days to present allegations. Another issue to take into account is that the beneficiaries of the benefits were taxed on them in personal income tax and, consequently, have the right to request a rectification from the Treasury.
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