Question 8482 — French people abroad

Summary

Article 1983 of the Civil Code provides that the holder of a life annuity can only request arrears by providing proof of its existence. Before paying a retirement pension, pension funds must therefore ensure that the insured person is still alive. To comply with the obligation imposed by article 1983 of the civil code, the funds rely on civil status data for policyholders residing on the national territory. He It is up to town halls to declare deaths occurring in their municipality to the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). These declarations give rise to daily exchanges of information between INSEE and the National Old Age Insurance Fund which is responsible, for all social security organizations, for managing the national identifier management system (SNGI). These exchanges allow funds to become aware of the deaths of policyholders, and consequently to terminate the payment of their pensions. For French retirees established abroad, due to a lack of reliable civil status data allowing automatic information from the SNGI, pension funds have had to develop existence checks. Indeed, beneficiaries of retirement pensions provided by French pension plans can continue to receive this income even when they are established abroad, without any minimum obligation to stay on national territory. Thus, for retirees established abroad, certificates of existence must be requested, as pension funds do not have automated knowledge of deaths. The production and regular sending of a certificate of existence by the insured is the only means allowing the funds to check that the payment of their pensions is always made correctly. However, the implementation of this procedure should not lead to excessively burdensome procedures for policyholders. This is why, pursuing the objective of simplifying procedures for policyholders, article 83 of the social security financing law for 2013 provided that beneficiaries of a retirement pension paid by a French organization and residing outside France must provide proof of existence to their pension funds at most once a year. In addition, Decree No. 2013-1156 of December 13, 2013 relating to the control of the existence of holders of pensions and old age benefits residing outside France authorized funds to pool the management of existence certificates, in order to avoid multiple requests from policyholders. More broadly, the funds, and in particular those of the general regime, are working on the elimination of existence certificates for retirees residing in certain countries of the European Union, through exchanges of civil status data. In this regard, an agreement was signed with Germany and exchanges have been operational since the end of 2015. Agreements of the same nature were also signed with Luxembourg and Belgium (2016), Spain (December 2017) and Denmark (January 2018). New countries are being connected for 2018: Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and Portugal. These exchanges guarantee optimal reliability in terms of monitoring the existence of policyholders and represent an important simplification measure for policyholders. This type of agreement is intended to be extended, particularly with European countries where almost half of the population resides. pensioners from the general system residing abroad. When it is not possible to use these data exchanges, the Government intends to develop tools for dematerialization and sharing of these certificates. Such a project is being undertaken under the aegis of the GIP Retirement Union (organization responsible for coordinating pooling projects between pension schemes) and will be operational in mid-2019. It is based on a unified service the scale of all pension plans, in order to pool the receipt, sending and verification of certificates of existence. This solution will allow the insured to transmit, in a single step, his certificate to all of his funds. This simplification will thus respond to the requests of pensioners of a French scheme residing abroad while improving the quality of existence checks.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

Timeline

No timeline events have been ingested for this record yet.

Votes

No vote records are attached yet.

Versions

No version snapshots stored. Document URLs remain at the source.

Documents

No documents linked.

Sponsors

No sponsors or actors listed by the source.

Related records

No cross-record relationships stored yet.