ECONOMY

On the trail of false pensions

The State’s General Accounting Office has identified over 2,600 cases in which pensions continued to be paid to recipients who had died for as much as six months after their death was registered.

The amount of the pensions paid out to deceased retirees reached 42.8 million euros, of which the state has retrieved nearly 30 million.

It used two methods to do this. One was by withdrawing 20.6 million euro from the bank accounts of the deceased pensioners through the interbank system. The second was by collecting the remaining 9.3 million either from co-holders of the accounts, who returned 1.9 million euros, or via tax offices that charged the accounts of the deceased or their heirs, fetching 7.4 million euros.

The search for the remaining 12.9 million euros continues by the accounting office.

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