The complainant received notification from the National Insurance Institute (NII) that one of his workers had been injured in a work accident and received an injury allowance from the NII. The notification required the complainant to reimburse the NII with the sum of the injury allowance. The complainant replied to the NII that the said worker was completely unknown to him, and that the accident had occurred before he had become an employer and opened a deductions file.
The complainant did not receive a response from the NII and assumed that the matter had been resolved, until a lien was placed on his account for a debt in injury allowance. The complainant contacted the NII, and even visited the local branch, to clear up the mistake, but to no avail.
The Office of the Ombudsman conducted an investigation, from which it transpired that the claims officer at the Department for Work Injuries had searched for the name of the employer of the injured worker by surname and not by the number of the deductions file. She had found the surname of the complainant and entered it into the system as the debtor, notwithstanding that the complainant's first name did not match that of worker's employer and at the time of the accident the complainant did not have a deductions file.
Following the investigation and the discovery of the mistake, the NII apologized to the complainant, removed the lien from his account and reimbursed him with the money that had been taken from the account.