The General Comptroller’s Office detected that 284 beneficiaries of the Second Universal Family Bonus granted in the framework of the health emergency caused by COVID-19, received in December 2020 amounts greater than S / 760 of the authorized economic subsidy, due to the manual processing of the register of beneficiaries due to the lack of configuration of a software National bank, a situation that generated an economic loss of S / 579,180.
According to the Specific Control Report No. 017-2021-2-0010-SCE (Evaluation period from March 31 to December 5, 2020), the event was caused by the erroneous processing of the beneficiary registry in the system for the payment of the voucher through the mobile banking, which was in charge of a professional service provider, who manually executed the activity “Assign the value of 760 to the amount field of the beneficiary registry” because the software (Control M) for automatic data upload was not configured.
The error in the loading of the information in the system, which was done partially manually, was not supervised by the corresponding instances of the Banco de la Nación, which led to the payment of 4,723 beneficiaries on December 5, 2020. sum of S / 9,920 each. Of that number of beneficiaries, 284 withdrew amounts greater than S / 760, causing the aforementioned economic damage.
It was evidenced that during the manual loading of the payroll, a running of the data of the economic amount was made, which was defined by characters, which caused the systems to interpret that the payment was S / 9,920. In this case, the alleged civil and administrative liability of 7 people (5 former employees and 2 bank employees) was identified.
This irregular event occurred because the Operations Management and the IT Management of the Banco de la Nación did not identify the level of exposure, controls and risk of the project “Payment of the COVID Bonus for Cellular Banking”, which had to be analyzed in the face of a change in the model of business and the alert given regarding the new form of payment of subsidies aimed at independent workers.
Thus, before the bond issuance, none of those instances took into consideration the report of the Bank’s Risk Management, from March 2020, which identified in the project risk of errors in the loading of data of the beneficiaries for the massive issuance of money orders, related to the DNI number, cell phone number and telephone operator, for which mitigation actions were suggested.
In June 2020, the Operations Management approved the directive for the payment of economic subsidies without having contemplated controls that mitigate the identified risk, which led to no coordination with the IT Management to identify possible errors in the load. of data on the payment of the subsidy due to inconsistency in the type and number of characters in the list of beneficiaries sent by Reniec and the Ministry of Labor and Employment Promotion (MTPE).
It should be noted that the directive for the payment of subsidies lacked instructions for loading mass subscription data through cell phone banking, the body in charge of validating the information and the form of coordination between the entities involved, as well as the procedures and cargo managers and their subsequent validation. This was only done until March 3 of this year, after the incident of December 5, 2020.
The specific control report was notified to the executive presidency of the Banco de la Nación with the recommendation to initiate the actions to delimit responsibilities and to order the corresponding legal actions against those allegedly responsible for the irregular events.
Citizens can access the Specific Control Report No. 017-2021-2-0010-SCE and other services through our Control Report Search Engine: www.gob.pe/contraloria.
