Approximately 8% of family benefits paid incorrectly: Court of Auditors refuses to validate for the third consecutive time.

Six billion three hundred million euros. This is the amount of payment errors that the Court of Accounts deemed definitive in its annual report on the certification of the Social Security accounts, published on May 16, 2025 for the 2024 financial year. The amount of errors not corrected by internal control actions is particularly high: €6.3 billion in improper payments but also in benefits not paid were observed at the end of 2024, and will never be regularized. Direct consequence: for the third consecutive year, the financial magistrates refused to certify the accounts of the family branch and of the CNAF.

The figure that stands out is this infamous 8%. These errors represent 8% of the amount of benefits, and concern notably the RSA, the activity bonus, and housing assistance. For every hundred euros paid by the CAFs, eight euros were miscalculated, misattributed, or never corrected in time. On a budget of €104.5 billion distributed by the Family Allowance Funds, the bill is steep. On €104.5 billion paid by the Family Allowances Funds (CAF), 8% of the benefits are tainted by errors, according to the Court.

How an error becomes irreversible

The system rests on a simple, almost naive principle: the recipient declares their resources, and the CAF computes their rights accordingly. The problem is that these declarations are not always accurate, whether deliberately manipulated or simply poorly filled out due to a lack of knowledge of the rules. The Court of Accounts distinguishes two stages in its risk assessment. Nine months after payment, the financial risk indicator rises to 11.7% of benefits paid, i.e. about €9.3 billion for 2024. This figure corresponds to all anomalies detected before post-payment controls had time to do their job.

Then comes the catch-up phase. CAFs have a deadline to review files, reclaim the overpayments, or issue arrears to affected beneficiaries. But this safety net never catches everything. After 24 months, when control actions stop, the indicator falls back to 8%, i.e. €6.3 billion: the amount the Court calls definitive, the sum that will never be corrected, neither by the authority that overpaid nor by the beneficiary who was underpaid. The Court recognizes, nonetheless, “the increase and the achievement of the objectives assigned to CAFs and the progress of the financial performance of controls,” but that is not enough to reverse the trend.

The real problem is that this internal control filter, designed to catch errors before they become irreversible, remains structurally outpaced by the scale of the phenomenon. The Court summed it up bluntly in a previous report: “the ability to detect errors by the network [of the CNAF] remains far below the risk induced by the insufficient reliability of the data declared by beneficiaries.” Translation: we are chasing a problem that we never have the means to fully catch up with.

RSA and the activity bonus, the underperformers

Not all benefits are affected equally. Two schemes account for the bulk of the damage: the Revenu de Solidarité Active (RSA) and the activity bonus, two allowances calculated on fluctuating resources, often tied to irregular work income or changing family situations. The errors related to the data used to determine benefits—particularly RSA, the activity bonus, and housing aid—amount to €6.3 billion. The Senate quantified the scope of the drift specifically for the activity bonus: more than a quarter of sums paid under the activity bonus are tainted by errors. A quarter. It is no longer a marginal anomaly; it is a structural malfunction.

Added to this pile of inadvertent errors is another, distinct but related issue: fraud. In the 2023 fiscal year, the Court had estimated fraud in family benefits at €3.9 billion, i.e. 4.9% of benefits paid, a sharp rise from the previous estimate. When errors and fraud are combined, you reach €8.5 billion that the CNAF should never have paid. Two phenomena different in nature, but identical in effect: public money going out with no chance of return, and sometimes eligible families who, conversely, never received what they were owed.

A recent bright spot, under strict scrutiny

The situation began to move. In its May 13, 2026 report on the 2025 financial year, the Court of Accounts, for the first time since 2021, certified the accounts of the family branch, albeit with reservations, ending three consecutive years of refusals or impossibility to certify. The trigger for this turnaround carries a technical name: the monthly resources system, rolled out from March 2025, which automatically pre-fills beneficiaries’ declarations of resources for RSA and the activity bonus using data supplied by employers and social agencies. A mechanism that works, in essence, on the same principle as tax withholding at source for income tax.

But caution remains, and the Court does not hide it. After three years of refusals, the Court finally certified the 2025 accounts of the family branch with reservations, but the measures taken to detect and correct errors and fraud on the RSA and the activity bonus remain insufficient, according to a report. Excluding the effect of this new mechanism, the stock of uncorrected errors at 24 months remains substantial: the amount of uncorrected errors, 24 months after beneficiaries’ declarations, is estimated at €7.4 billion. As for detected fraud, it is rising but remains negligible relative to its true magnitude: the branch’s prevention and detection efforts yield increasing returns (€509 million in 2025, +13%), but these results represent less than 10% of the estimated fraudulent indus. In other words, the file remains open, and the Court warned that it would wait to see the effects of the new mechanism over time before lifting its reservations.

Sources: senat.fr | vie-publique.fr | assemblee-nationale.fr