Undue payments and benefits "not wrongly paid": the family branch of the Social Security has spent nearly 6 billion euros by losses and profits in 2022, according to the Court of Auditors, which refused Tuesday to certify the last financial year. The finding is severe, the sentence without appeal. The amount of accounting "errors" of the family branch and its armed wing, the National Family Allowances Fund (CNAF), increased again in 2022, 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.
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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". 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 pensioners still receives a pension 'affected by at least one miscalculation'.