The sentence is final. The Court of Auditors refused Tuesday to certify the accounts of the family branch of the Sécu, which has spent nearly six billion euros by profit and loss in 2022. The amount of accounting "errors" of the family branch and its armed wing, the National Family Allowances Fund (CNAF), increased again last year, reaching 5.8 billion euros, a sum that includes both the amounts wrongly paid and those that should have been paid to the insured. This figure partly covers that of fraud, estimated at 2.8 billion in 2021 by the CNAF, which will update this assessment only next year.
This sum of "errors", which "represents 7.6% of the amount of benefits" paid last year, is definitively lost for the Social Security or for some applicants for the RSA, the activity bonus or housing benefits, whose inaccurate declarations dating back more than 24 months "will never be regularized", says the Court of Auditors.
"A hypercomplex benefits system"
Judging this amount "much too high" and deploring the absence of "actions to redress 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 contest this decision. On the contrary, "we agree on the figures", he said, explaining the situation by "a hypercomplex system of benefits" and a succession of events (Covid, reform of APL ...) that "exploded the indicators of errors".
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 source", including a "pre-declaration of resources", should eventually make it possible to "significantly reduce the risk" of errors, according to him.
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The other branches of the Social Security are doing better, with a validation subject to reservation. The Health Insurance still has an error rate of around 10% on reimbursements of health expenses and work stoppages, for a total of about 3.8 billion euros. However, the Court welcomes "progress" in the detection of fraud, several targeted studies (nurses, general practitioners, physiotherapists, etc.) having led to a range of 0.9 to 1.3 billion euros, on a perimeter not yet exhaustive.
The Old-Age Insurance estimates for its part the "damage of fraud" at only 200 million euros, result "to be considered with caution" according to the Court. It also notes that one in seven new retirees still receives a pension "affected by at least one error" in calculation.