Portugal's Court of Auditors has detected hundreds of cases where the monthly pensions have been paid to beneficiaries that have been unable to use the money as they are dead.
Some cases have been unearthed where the Ministry of Justice has failed to inform the Social Security department until ten years after the pensioner had died.
The Court of Auditors in the past has been critical of the many shortcomings in the Social Security department’s computer systems, so this year undertook a comprehensive study. The results would be laughable if they were not so serious.
Using information on the Social Security database, the investigators found thousands of errors in the 2.9 million pensions paid by Social Security and 187,000 paid by the Caixa Geral de Aposentações, General Pension Fund.
In 3,176 cases the date of birth of the beneficiaries was incomplete or was incorrect. In almost 45,000 General Pension Fund pensions there was no tax identification held for the beneficiaries.
A sample interrogation of the system took 16,000 pensioner details and discovered that 492 people did not need their pensions as they already had died yet their pensions were being sent to, and presumably drawn by grieving families.
This senseless waste of public money should result in systems changes and a tightening of the link between the Ministry of Justice and Social Security when someone dies; 'should' being the key word here.
