The Polish Social Security Service wants to return child payments, unreasonably received by Ukrainian citizens, for leaving the country immediately after receiving such payments.
After the full-scale invasion of the Russian army, many citizens of Ukraine, fearing for their safety, began to travel to European countries, where they are granted temporary protection status and financial support. For example, in Poland, Ukrainian refugees were overpaid 2 million zlotys in benefits, which is about 450 thousand dollars. It means that people received these payments after they returned to Ukraine, Rzeczpospolita reports.
According to journalists, we are talking about payments for children (under the programs “500+”, “Family Trustee Capital”) to refugees who left Poland, but did not report this to the Polish Social Insurance Office ZUS.
It is noted that Polish laws say that if a Ukrainian refugee leaves Poland for more than 30 days, he loses the right to receive benefits. But there were cases when Ukrainians with children came to a neighboring country specifically to apply for benefits, and then immediately left back.
“The social service consistently issues regular decisions on unreasonably received benefits and obliges the recipients to return them,” said the press secretary of the service, Pavel Zhebrovsky.
According to him, the money can be returned within two years. At the same time, as of now, Ukrainians have returned only 35.4 thousand zlotys (about 8 thousand dollars).
It is also reported that at the end of January 2023, ZUS gained access to the register of the border service, so now social workers track the departure of Ukrainians from Poland. Previously, all information about the departure of a refugee was received by ZUS only after a month.
During the last month, after receiving the necessary information, ZUS has suspended payments to approximately 3,200 refugees from Ukraine.
Recall that since January 18, a financial support program has been launched for Ukrainian refugees in Poland, under which people will be paid 6,000 hryvnias over three months. It turns out that in general, you can get 18 thousand hryvnia.
Meanwhile, analysts compared the level of salaries in Poland and Ukraine for the 10 most popular vacancies. The gap between wages in the countries amounted to several tens of thousands of hryvnias.
