20,000 owe money after RSI tech bug
Admin chaos at Régime Social des Indépendants means thousands of self-employed have been forgotten about for two years
THOUSANDS of self-employed people have been forgotten about by the social security system for the past two years due to an administrative problem and now face huge bills for overdue health and pension contributions.
The Régime Social des Indépendants, which collects social security contributions from 1.6 million self-employed workers, says between 15,000 and 20,000 people have not been issued bills for the past two years.
The bug means about €400m in late social security payments is now due - about €20,000 per person affected.
According to Aujourd'hui en France, the RSI has blamed the mistake on a computer glitch. The group introduced a new system in January 2008 to merge three separate databases and make the system compatible with that of sister contributions body Urssaf.
The director of the RSI's payment centre in the Var, Antoine Gros, told the paper: "We are not charging any late penalties and we are making up people's lost pension entitlement. If necessary we will give people extensions to catch up with overdue payments."
According to Ouest France, the RSI wants to get the problem completely fixed by February.
The president of trade union Cidunati told 20 Minutes: "How, in this age, can an IT bug last two years? No one is accepting any personal responsibility for this."
