European Union staff has the right to 3 types of family allowances: household allowance, dependent child allowance, school allowance. The statutory provisions (articles 67 § 2 [1] and article 68 § 2 [2] of the staff regulations) foresee rules against the overlapping of all family allowances granted by the European Union and received from other sources.
EU staff must declare to the administration via Sysper if they receive such national allowances and they are deducted from those paid by the European Union. Staff must also check even whether they are entitled to payments from the national authority, sometimes being asked to provide evidence that they are not entitled to payments from elsewhere [3].
Belgium: frequent indexation and recovery of overpayments
Apparently, the high number of family allowances indexations in Belgium that took place recently created a substantial backlog in the processing of these declarations. It may seem not a financial burden, but colleagues need to keep certain financial reserves to pay the amounts back, once PMO starts with a recovery which happens in some cases long months after the colleagues declared in due time the allowances and changes to them.
Generation 2004 sent a note [4] in May to PMO and to DG HR asking to ensure an appropriate support for the relevant unit in PMO to follow up timely on declarations of allowances received from other sources. This was important because the same unit in PMO is also dealing with the reimbursement of school fees, and we received reports about delays in this area as well.
In its reply [5] PMO underlined that the backlog in processing the family declarations was due mainly to multiple indexations to the Belgian regional family allowances occurring since 2022, as well as their complexity. Moreover, PMO has informed us about launching the process to automate the indexation of Belgian allowances received from other sources [6]. This automation will, in most cases, relieve colleagues from the burden of manually declaring all updates of allowances received from other sources and enable PMO to address the backlog.
Generation 2004 is happy to inform that the announced automatic indexation for the Brussels Region and Wallonia has been implemented by PMO on 15th of June. Some details of it have been presented by the Head of Sector PMO.1.001 during the Brussels Local Staff Committee Plenary Session in June. On Saturday, June 15th, PMO has launched the automatic indexation of Belgian family allowances, an e-mail has been sent to eligible staff that the indexation has been executed.
The retroactive calculation for all Belgian allowances’ indexations done in the past 5 years was planned to be processed later in June. PMO was still looking how to treat cases when an official or other agent declared the indexation in SysPer before 15th of June, the solution on the table was to delete manually those declarations from SysPer after informing the staff, and let the system run with automatic indexation.
Outside Belgium
It is also worth mentioning that in some other countries (Luxembourg, Poland, and Germany) where indexation of national family allowances is semi-automatic it was possible for PMO to introduce a partially automatic system in SysPer. After introduction of the automatic system for Belgian family allowances the number of staff who must declare their family allowances received from other sources by themselves will be very limited, which will help to decrease the backlog in processing those declarations.
Finally, Generation 2004 wish to remind that PMO is due to inform all eligible staff 2 months in advance about the amount that will be recovered, and that staff can either appeal this decision or ask for instalments. Recovery of the full amount is due in 2 years’ time.
As always, if you have questions or comments, feel free to contact us [7].