Thousands of illegal pension claims discovered
Almost 110,000 people who have been claiming state pensions over the last few years have not registered themselves in a census that has recently been completed, prompting suggestions that they may have wrongly been accepting retirement pay.
Speaking to Skai TV on Friday, the head of Greece?s main social security fund, IKA, Rovertos Spiropoulos said that 896,643 pensioners had registered as part of the census but 109,421 who have been receiving payments had not.
Spiropoulos said that despite an awareness campaign over the last few weeks, it was possible that some pensioners had simply not been aware that they needed to confirm their details.
However, he confirmed that there are thousands of cases in which pensions were illegally claimed. Given that the average IKA pension is about 800 euros per month, Spiropoulos said that the cost of these wrongful claims could be more than 1 billion euros per year.
Spiropoulos said that the figures would be confirmed over the next few weeks and then legal proceedings would begin to recover the money.
