Social Security will not be able to recover 7,121.31 euros that it claimed from the children of a retiree who died in 2001 for having been paying his pension for 16 years into a separate account with his wife. The Provincial Court of Valencia explains that the four-year statute of limitations for demanding overpaid benefits also applies when the INSS directs the claim against the heirs, without being able to invoke the fifteen-year period of the Civil Code.
According to the ruling of the Judiciaryit all started when a man who had been receiving a retirement pension since 1994 died on October 14, 2001. The pension continued to enter each month into the checking account he shared with his wife, an account of indistinct ownership that she kept open without communicating the death. Social Security did not detect the error until the widow died, on March 31, 2017. Between November 2001 and March 2017, Social Security deposited 12,410 euros into that account that no longer belonged to it.
When the organization realized it, it demanded a refund from the bank, which refunded the amount corresponding to the last four years, 3,573.33 euros. The oldest section remained unrecovered, between August 2004 and May 2013. For that amount, 7,121.31 euros, the INSS sued the three children of the marriage in August 2019 as joint heirs. The Court of First Instance dismissed the claim, considering that the action was time-barred, so Social Security appealed to the Provincial Court.
Debts expire after four years
The Social Security argument was based on considering that the claim addressed to the heirs was outside the specific Social Security regime and should be governed by the fifteen-year period that the Civil Code provides for personal actions for collection of undue amounts. A comfortable thesis for the Administration, because it would have allowed it to recover thirteen years of payments instead of four.
The Court rejects it, explaining that the Social Security law sets a four-year period to repay benefits collected in excess, counted from the collection or from the time the refund could be demanded, and does not distinguish between who received the money. The norm speaks of “workers and other people” obliged to reintegrate, a broad expression that also includes the widow who collected the pension for having an indistinct account with the deceased.
The argument of treating children as unrelated third parties did not fit either. The defendants responded as heirs, that is, because by accepting the inheritance they took the place of their parents in rights and obligations. The court adds that if the children now discovered that their father’s pension was undercalculated, they would not be able to escape the four-year period to claim it from Social Security. The rule, explains the Court, must operate in both directions.
The last argument has to do with what the Constitution says. If Social Security did not detect a payment that entered a bank account in your name month after month for sixteen years, the Court considers that it cannot pass on to the heirs the consequences of such prolonged administrative negligence. The prescription, says the ruling, operates precisely so that rights not exercised on time can no longer be claimed late, also when the Administration is the one who lets the clock run.