An employee of the Pu County Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Shanxi Province, “started working at the age of 1 and retired at the age of 22”, received a total pension of 690,000 yuan while working for a new unit for remuneration; an intermediary in Acheng District, Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, bribed 4 public officials for a long time, illegally handled insurance for at least 271 people, and it is estimated that the pension fund expenditure loss will be 115 million yuan.
On June 24, the Audit Office of the People’s Republic of China published the “State Council’s Audit Report on the Implementation of the Central Budget and Other Fiscal Revenues and Expenditure in 2024” (hereinafter referred to as the “Audit Report”), which disclosed the audit of the Audit Office on key livelihood funds such as the pension insurance fund.
The report introduced that the Audit Office focused on auditing 4.14 trillion yuan of basic pension insurance funds for enterprise employees, staff of government agencies and institutions, and urban and rural residents in 25 provinces, and found various problems amounting to 60.161 billion yuan.
Specific problems include: 477,000 people in difficult groups and flexible employment in 23 provinces who should have been insured but were not; 2,497,300 landless farmers in 21 provinces who should have been compensated for pension insurance premiums but were not compensated. 22 provinces failed to clean up “small policies” that did not meet the requirements of national coordination, and improperly increased fund expenditure responsibilities by 18.753 billion yuan. Among them: 9 provinces retained 16 benefit items such as “heating fees” outside the national unified list of pension insurance benefit items, resulting in an additional expenditure of 16.723 billion yuan from 2022 to 2024. 20 provinces violated the provisions of “for those who do not meet the conditions for a one-time payment of premiums before national coordination, the fund and local governments shall bear the increased benefit expenditure after coordination in proportion”, and the 5.941 billion yuan of additional benefit expenditure of 263,600 people who did not meet the conditions before coordination after coordination was paid by the fund, which was 2.03 billion yuan more than the proportion borne by the fund.
In addition, the National Audit Office also found that 41.408 billion yuan of pension insurance funds were squeezed, misappropriated or defrauded.
Among them, 13 provinces misappropriated 40.626 billion yuan of urban and rural residents’ pension insurance funds for “three guarantees” expenditures, repayment of government debts, etc. From 2009 to 2024, 90 intermediaries in 16 provinces helped more than 20,000 people who did not meet the conditions to participate in insurance illegally by forging labor contracts and arbitration documents, etc., at the cost of fund losses in exchange for intermediaries or personal profits. For example, since 2019, an intermediary in Acheng District, Harbin City, has long bribed 4 public officials, and by falsifying materials review, labor arbitration and other links, at least 271 people who did not meet the conditions were illegally processed for insurance, which is expected to result in a loss of 115 million yuan in fund expenditures, and the intermediary has made at least 4 million yuan in profit.
28,300 workers in 25 provinces illegally received pension benefits of 519 million yuan by providing false medical records or tampering with files to retire early. For example, the personnel file of an employee of the Pu County Center for Disease Control in Shanxi Province was altered in 14 places. He “worked at the age of 1 and retired at the age of 22” and still “retired” after going through layers of review. He received a total of 690,000 yuan in pension while working in a new unit for pay.
The National Audit Office pointed out that since May 2024, audits have found and transferred more than 430 major violations of discipline and law, involving more than 1,400 people and more than 63 billion yuan. Among them, corruption problems are frequent in the fields of medical care, education, and elderly care, and “small officials are corrupt” and “small officials are corrupt” are still rampant; some illegal gangs are blinded by greed and seriously impact social order and people’s livelihood in order to gain personal or small group interests.
The National Audit Office suggested that the overall management of pension insurance funds should be strengthened. Urge local governments to find out the situation of key groups participating in pension insurance and the funding gap, and coordinate financial resources to gradually resolve the problem; clean up and standardize “small policies”, and severely crack down on illegal intermediary fraud and insurance fraud and other behaviors.
