In total, 9,500 families have received or will receive before the end of the year a letter from the Generalitat informing them that they must return the money received from benefits such as the Guaranteed Citizenship Income (RGC). The amount claimed by the government is on average 7,500 euros, which represents a total of more than 71 million, as Catalunya Ràdio has argued and elDiario.es has confirmed.
The secretary general of the Department of Social Rights, Raúl Moreno, explains that the situation is mainly due to two errors. There are cases of people who reported a change in their personal and economic situation, but because the administration “took a few months to make the change,” these households collected money that did not belong to them. On the other hand, cases of users who did not notify the change of status were also detected.
The councilor, Mònica Martínez Bravo, has already requested to appear before Parliament next week to discuss this situation. The Department assures that this is an “unexpected problem” that the new government has faced and assures that it finds its origin in “the design of certain benefits and the limits of resources to manage them”.
“Our responsibility is to resolve it,” assured Moreno, adding that the Generalitat does not want to “generate more problems for families in vulnerable situations.” However, the government is working on technical and legislative changes that will allow the administration to have “systems to automatically detect these changes” and avoid these situations.
This situation is not new in 2024, as the Sindicatura de Greuges (the Catalan mediator) states, but in that year, “the issue accelerated”. It is for this reason that this institution opened an ex officio action. For the moment, they say, they have no response from the ministry.
“Without underestimating the cases of bad faith of certain beneficiaries, we have the feeling that the majority of undue payments claimed are generated by poor performance of the administration”, as underlines the Sindicatura, which discredits the Generalitat for not “adequately processes” information and is “significantly behind schedule” in case review processes.
According to the Court of Auditors, the restitution of these sums could be “very difficult” for the people concerned. The administration, which hopes to have a resolution by the end of the year, is evaluating the positions of the European Court of Human Rights on equivalent situations and studying solutions to “not violate the rights of particularly vulnerable people who are trapped in a problem that they did not cause.
