Rescue package for long-term care: Billions paid without verification

The coronavirus pandemic burdened long-term care facilities in Germany. In order to cushion the impact of the pandemic, the long-term care insurance funds paid an additional amount of more than €7 billion via the rescue package for long-term care. Our audit findings show: The underlying payment procedure was prone to abuse – and subsequent checks are not yet adequate.

The coronavirus pandemic led to additional expenditure and revenue shortfalls in long-term care facilities in Germany. Therefore, the long-term care insurance funds provided long-term care facilities with a rescue package for long-term care. Via this rescue package, an additional amount of more than €7 billion was paid to long-term care facilities.

We reviewed the procedure of paying and verifying support from the rescue package for long-term care. We developed the following key findings:

• No consistent processing specifications: The long-term care insurance funds processed the applications differently. Some long-term care insurance funds issued notices of award including instructions on legal remedies, others just paid the money. This led to uncertainties and a different treatment of long-term care facilities.
• Short disbursement period: Because of the short disbursement period of 14 days, the time frame was not long enough to check applications on a larger scale – at least for plausibility – before paying the grants.
• Verification in 10 per cent of the cases only: The grants were paid on a provisional basis subject to a possible verification procedure. However, this subsequent check had to be carried out in 10 per cent of the long-term care facilities only. The checks made so far showed a high level of failure and resulted in substantial recovery claims.
• Limited options for verification: Even in subsequent checks, the long-term care insurance funds often could only inadequately verify eligibility. For example, long-term care facilities did not always have to submit supporting documents. Furthermore, the long-term care insurance funds were often not even able to assess the documents with regard to content. As a result, checks were often ineffective.