Retirement pension: why are several thousand retirees at risk of not receiving it?

It’s a cold shower for some retirees. Following a calculation problem between France Travail, the former Pôle emploi, and Pension Insurance, thousands of retirees, formerly unemployed, must repay overpayments. The amounts claimed would range from 5,000 to 10,000 euros.

A “significant dysfunction” which corresponds for certain files to “years of wrongly paying the return to work assistance allowance (ARE)”, indicates the rapporteur in a document published last Wednesday 24.

A computer mix-up of the data flows of the Retirement and Occupational Health Insurance Fund (Carsat) on the forecast date of full retirement and those established by France Travail. Indeed, some unemployed employees received the return-to-work assistance allowance even though they had reached the age to receive a pension without reduction (67 years).

They were then not automatically transferred to retirement, which led to overpayments in the payment of unemployment compensation (return to employment assistance allowance), paid by France Travail. These employees should have received a retirement pension at that time.

This error comes from the document on which France Travail relied in its calculation of the full retirement age. In reality, the most precise document is the career regularization certificate, otherwise called “unemployment compensated career regularization”.

According to information from Capital, France Travail still has to re-examine 150,000 files. In fact, the organization relied on the career record to make its calculation, a less precise document which does not take into account the free quarters to which parents are entitled upon the birth of a child, for example.

“At the end of January, 50,000 files had been filed and less than 5% of them were notified of an overpayment and then contacted to support them in their process, i.e. a little less than 2,500 people,” indicates France Labor à Capital. Each file is analyzed on a case-by-case basis by France Travail, also relying on the expertise of Carsat (the retirement and occupational health insurance fund, Editor’s note).”

If you are in this situation, can you receive the amount of retirement pension that you should have received instead of unemployment benefit? “In very exceptional cases, retroactivity of retirement is possible,” indicates Capital Retirement Insurance, which emphasizes “without specifying what these rare exceptions will be.”

Unfortunately, this remedy is still unclear. It is likely that you will not be able to enjoy this right which should have been yours.