Pension insurance, France Travail and Unédic are strengthening their collaboration to facilitate and secure the transition to retirement for jobseekers

This new agreement also has strong ambitions in terms of information and prevention of overpayments.

The previous agreement between Retirement Insurance, France Travail and Unédic expired in May 2024. This new text is an opportunity to strengthen the partnership between the three organisations.

The law requires jobseekers to stop paying benefits when they reach the legal retirement age and have completed the number of quarters required to receive a full pension.

The current transmission and information system under the previous 2021 agreement may have created situations of overpayments, especially when the theoretical and actual retirement dates were not consistent. To remedy this, the three companies, keen to prevent these situations from recurring, have committed to establishing a new pathway to ease the transition to retirement for jobseekers and safeguard their rights by avoiding any resource interruption.

Streamlining the transition from social security to pension and strengthening the information for jobseekers

From the end of the year, a new route will be offered to jobseekers close to retirement age, combining the exchange of information between Pension Insurance and France Travail and the intervention of advisers:

• France Travail will start raising awareness among jobseekers aged 55 and over by increasing the number of joint pension workshops between Pensionsforsikring and France Travail (90,000 jobseekers participated in 2023). Special attention will also be paid to jobseekers aged 55 and over, who will be made aware by France Travail of the possibility to request career regularization online on the pension insurance website, from that age, and in particular inform their children so that they are assigned the corresponding quarters.
• 15 months before the legal retirement age, France Travail will send a letter co-signed by France Travail and Retirement Insurance to the jobseekers concerned, inviting them to go to the Retirement Insurance website, which will offer a dedicated service entitled “I complete my career and declare my children”.A career regularization certificate indicating the retirement age will then be established and sent to the insured as well as to France Travail by Retirement Insurance within 4 months.

For people who are not familiar with online services, France Travail will help them make an agreement with their pension fund that will offer them a suitable personal path.

• Jobseekers who do not respond to this first request will be proactively contacted by mail by France Travail 7 months before the legal retirement age to remind them of the obligation to present a career regularization certificate under penalty of seeing the payment of benefits stopped or be suspended. France Travail will also send the list of jobseekers in this case to Cnav as well as their contact details on a monthly basis so that the regional pension insurance funds can offer them employment as soon as possible.
• Finally, 6 months before the expected full rate age, France Travail will inform jobseekers of the end of unemployment benefits and encourage them to apply for a pension 5 months before the expected full rate date.

Strengthen local partnerships

This new agreement will be implemented in all regions to strengthen cooperation throughout the territory. In particular, the agreement stipulates for each region:

• Establishment of a circuit for the reporting of individual files between the regional teams of France Travail and Retirement Insurance.
• The arrangements for organizing “employment – retirement” workshops and identifying the persons concerned.
• In cases where France Travail discovers a situation of overpayment of unemployment benefits, after knowledge of the elements of the pension notice sent by the pension insurance and gives rise to a case to recover the overpayment from France Travail, the regional pension insurance offices (Carsat ) finance will cooperate and provide the regional directorates of France Travail all the information at their disposal to resolve the situations.

The new agreement finally allows for renewed management with regular monitoring of the effects of the various measures implemented to assess their effectiveness.

This partnership agreement was adopted by the board of France Travail today.

To Thibaut Guilluy, Director General of France Travail: ” Knowing the existing problems in dealing with the transition to retirement of jobseekers and the situations that this may have caused, we are acting with our partners to no longer impose our complexity on our users and to create continuity of attention between our public services and very quickly implemented concrete actions that our users have the right to expect to improve and simplify procedures and information. Our goal: secure their rights, implement coordinated support and thus avoid interruptions of resources or situations of overpayments. »

For Renaud Villard, Director General of Pension Insurance: ” Together we took stock of the existing process: it is very administrative, very procedural, based on paper exchanges. This path from unemployment to pension is smooth for simple cases – but difficult for complex cases. Our policyholders told us this strongly. We are therefore going to reverse the trend by creating a digital journey, accessible to all ages. From November, Pensionsforsikringen will offer an online course, followed from start to finish, with the option to make an emergency appointment at any time and receive support. Our policyholders ask us to keep it simple. I want to do better than simple. Simple, reassuring, safe – and humane. Serving all of our audiences. »
To Christophe Valentie, General Manager of Unédic: “ Unédic ensures the quality of the service provided to jobseekers by the operator France Travail. In addition to monitoring the measures implemented by France Travail on this point, our wish is to ensure a smooth transition from the unemployment insurance system to the old-age insurance system. The social partners who administer the unemployment insurance are particularly aware of this and will always, in cooperation with the state, ensure an ongoing improvement of the situation.. »