A woman from Avilés who collected her grandmother’s pension despite her having died 35 years ago has been acquitted of the accusation of Social Security fraud and usurpation of civil status due to the “laziness” of the banking entity and the National Institute of Social Security (INSS), as stated in the ruling of the Civil and Criminal Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Asturias (TSJA) and as El Correo de Avilés has learned.
The ruling, which confirms the acquittal, considers proven that the grandmother paid her pension month after month into a bank account in which her daughter—the defendant’s mother—was a co-owner. The deposit continued to be made after the old woman died in 1988 and after her daughter died (in 2013) until December 2019. As she relates, the INSS and the bank were unaware of the pensioner’s death.
The court recalls that one of the functions of the public body is the control of the right to economic benefits from the Social Security system in its contributory modalities. In addition, it also stipulates that the paying financial entities must communicate to the corresponding managing entity, at least once a year, the survival of the holders of those pensions and other periodic benefits.
Although the functions of the organization specify the control of benefits, “for more than 30 years absolutely nothing was done.” They are “public funds that have been allowed to be disposed of without any control,” says the ruling. And, although it does not deny “the fraud that the accused used”, it emphasizes “the conviction that it was the apathy of those deceived that blurred the sufficiency of deception as a basic element of the crime of fraud for which she was accused.” .
The accused, according to the Aviles media, had the funds from August 2013 to December 2019. With them she made refunds, bank transfers, card payments and direct debit of receipts. The pensions received totaled 61,834.46 euros and the bank paid 39,176.22 euros to the General Treasury of Social Security corresponding to the period between January 2016 and December 2019.
The INSS filed an appeal in which it denounced an error in the evaluation of the evidence and requested the annulment of the lower court ruling with return of the proceedings to the Provincial Court to issue a new resolution.
