The Supreme Court has imposed on a woman a sentence of two years in prison and the obligation to reimburse 29,658 euros to the National Institute of Social Security, considering her the perpetrator of a subsidy fraud offense for having continued to collect for years her deceased grandmother’s pension without reporting her death.
The Criminal Chamber, in a ruling to which Europa Press has had access, adds as an accessory penalty the prohibition on receiving public subsidies and benefiting from tax or Social Security advantages for a period of three years.
With this ruling, the high court convicts the defendant for the first time, who had been acquitted both by the Provincial Court of Asturias and by the High Court of Justice of the Principality. Social Security appealed those acquittals and the Supreme Court has now upheld its appeal.
The proven facts detail that the grandmother was the holder of a bank account, on which her daughter, the defendant’s mother, also appeared as co-holder. The widow’s pension was deposited into that account every month. The deposits continued after the pensioner’s death in 1988 and after the death of the mother in August 2013, since until December 2019 neither the National Institute of Social Security nor the financial institution had official knowledge of the death.
According to the ruling, the convicted woman took advantage of that situation to use the money in the account, fully aware that it came solely from her grandmother’s pension that Social Security was still paying. During that time she made cash withdrawals, transfers, card payments and direct debits charged to those funds.
In the period analyzed, the pensions deposited reached a total of 61,834.46 euros, while the banking entity returned to the General Treasury of Social Security 39,176.22 euros corresponding to the amounts received between January 2016 and December 2019. The account was not closed until 2021.
"CONSCIOUS CONCEALMENT"
The magistrates point out that Social Security and the bank did not carry out adequate control over the continued existence of the pension holder, "which only adds to the lack of control with which said Institute and the banking entity acted".
However, they point out that that lack of oversight "does not remove factual force when it comes to pointing out that the pension income of the deceased from which the granddaughter took advantage was improper".
The ruling emphasizes that "the improper nature of the receipt of the pension results from the logic of things itself and also from the regulatory provisions that govern this receipt".
The court specifies that "in effect, the criminal offense is filled by the expression of the enjoyment of a pension through the conscious concealment of facts of which she had the duty to inform, a duty to inform that arises from the applicable regulations on said receipt".
It qualifies the conduct as "improper economic receipt" and sets at 29,658 euros the amount that the woman must pay to Social Security as civil liability.
The figure, the judges explain, corresponds to "the amount of the improper receipts once the amounts that were reimbursed are subtracted, specifically the amount that results from subtracting 39,176 euros from 61,834 euros".