Payments to deceased pensioners: IPS authorities respond

Officials at Paraguay’s Social Security Institute, known as IPS, have defended their handling of pension payments made to people who had already died.

The response followed a report from the Comptroller General that identified nearly 58.715 billion guaraníes in pension credits paid between 2020 and 2024 to almost 11,000 deceased beneficiaries. The average annual amount was close to 12 billion guaraníes.

Vanessa Cubas, IPS manager for economic benefits, said the payments fell by approximately 54% in 2025. At a news conference on Monday, officials described a downward trend in what they called “unfortunate payments.”

Américo Riquelme, the institute’s director of pensions, said payments had declined by 75% so far in 2026 compared with the 2020-2024 period. That amounted to about 246 million guaraníes per month, down from 979 million monthly during the four-year period.

Riquelme said only 15% of the payments occurred in the month after a pensioner’s death. The rest were credited during the month of death and therefore represented amounts still owed to the beneficiary. He said it was nearly impossible to eliminate every such payment because some pensioners die between the monthly payment cutoff and the disbursement date.

IPS authorities said they were working to shorten that interval and potentially reduce the number of payments made in such circumstances. The comptroller’s report attributed the payments to a lack of synchronization in IPS’s digitized records.

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Unfortunate payments