French Pension Crackdown: Auditors Target Expat Retirees and Working Pensioners

Two categories of retirees are in the sights of the Court of Auditors. These are retirees living abroad, estimated at more than one million, and those combining employment and retirement pension, whose number is around 710,000.

Many seniors choose to enjoy their retirement outside of metropolitan France, particularly in countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium, Turkey, the United Kingdom and Israel. In most cases, their relatives do not report their deaths to the French authorities, continuing to receive the pensions every month. A phenomenon that costs the French state nearly 60 million euros per year, according to Renaud Villard, director of the National Old-Age Insurance Fund, quoted by Le Journal du Net.

To limit this fraud, the Court of Auditors is asking the state to verify "the existence of pensioners" in these ten destinations popular with French seniors. Concretely, the institution is calling for the implementation of "documentary" checks on retirees living abroad who will have to provide a certificate of life, a valid identity document and their original birth certificate, within a maximum of three months. Expatriate retirees will also have to report regularly to the consulate, at the risk of losing their pension.

As for retirees combining employment and retirement, the Court of Auditors denounces "windfall effects", stressing that this system, originally intended for retirees with modest pensions, also benefits wealthy pensioners. The sages are therefore calling on the state to intensify the controls and tighten the conditions allowing the combination of employment and retirement.