The Court of Auditors has exposed the existence of unequal treatment by the mutual insurance companies collaborating with Social Security when granting extraordinary benefits to self-employed workers during the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The extraordinary cessation-of-activity benefit for self-employed workers was one of the exceptional measures approved by the Government with the aim of protecting these professionals who, due to the restrictions imposed after the declaration of the state of alarm on March 14, 2020, were forced to suspend their activity or suffered a drop in turnover of, at least, 75%.
The body headed by Enriqueta Chicano had already released in 2023 an audit report in which it warned of the existence of improper payments to self-employed workers who did not meet the conditions to receive the aid. That document detailed that around 280,000 self-employed workers came to collect a total of 505.5 million euros in benefits that were not due to them.
After the clarification of those irregular payments was then left pending, this Friday the Court released a complementary note to the initial report in which it communicates that the process of recovering the aid granted without meeting all the required conditions has already been completed. Once the benefits that had been provisionally approved during the health crisis were reviewed, 1.4 million beneficiaries were definitively confirmed, with 3.614 billion euros paid and 39,447 benefits denied.
However, the Court has stressed that "certain situations of unequal treatment among the beneficiaries" have continued to occur, arising from the application of different criteria by the Mutual Insurance Companies Collaborating with Social Security, especially as regards the calculation of the regulatory base of the benefit and its incompatibility with other aid from the system.
Likewise, differences linked to the use of the presumption of compliance with the requirement of reduction in turnover have been detected, which affected unevenly the requests resolved prior to its effective application.
The Court of Auditors insists on the importance of ensuring the homogeneity of the criteria in the management of these extraordinary benefits, in order to avoid the disparities identified that have impacted self-employed workers differently depending on the mutual insurance company in charge of processing each case.
Most provisional resolutions are consolidated
The final volume of beneficiaries of the benefit has accounted for 97.35% of the total of provisional resolutions issued, a percentage that has made possible the recovery of the amounts improperly paid during the pandemic after the denial of 39,447 applications.
The total value of the exemptions from Social Security contributions linked to this aid has risen to 1.458 billion euros, a figure that is added to the 3.614 billion euros received directly by the definitive beneficiaries of the measure.