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A lawyer is annoyed: the fee exemption doesn’t work well enough for her clients.
The impaired son of a woman from the canton of Solothurn came of age in 2020. He lives in his parents’ house and is cared for by his mother. After his 18th birthday, she received a notice from the canton’s compensation office that her son was also entitled to supplementary benefits (EL) in addition to his IV pension.
The law stipulates that all people with EL are exempt from paying the radio and television fee. Around 350,000 households in which a person with EL lives should not receive an invoice from Serafe, the company that collects fees for the federal government.
Document uploaded: Serafe doesn’t know anything about it
In order to apply for exemption from the fee, those affected or their representatives must submit a confirmation from the compensation fund to Serafe. That’s exactly what the mother of the now adult did in October 2020 and uploaded the corresponding document to Serafe. This process is not new for her; she also supports six other people. In this respect, it was no surprise to her that the upload didn’t work on the first attempt, she tells the SRF consumer magazine “Espresso”.
The following year, however, a completely normal Serafe invoice arrived. She contacted customer service: “They said: We didn’t get anything. Go to the residents’ registration office, they probably made a mistake.” So the woman uploaded the document a second time. Three months later the first reminder came in the mail.
Serafe is self-critical when it comes to customer service
The woman is angry, especially since the residents’ office confirmed to her in December 2021 that the necessary data had been transmitted to Serafe. When another invoice was sent to the family in July 2022, the mother angrily called Serafe customer service again. This time she’s lucky: a customer service employee takes care of the matter. “And he actually found out that all the documents and data were there. They simply weren’t processed.”
Serafe media spokesman Erich Heynen contradicts this. According to his clarifications, the necessary data was only transmitted by the residents’ office later, in July 2022: “Only then could the person concerned be assigned to a household and only then could this household be exempt from the tax based on the EL document.” However, he self-critically admits that Serafe “could have under certain circumstances researched more intensively before the residents’ office had correctly supplied the data for the first time”. Since the home address of the young EL beneficiary is on the compensation fund document, this research would probably have been done quite quickly.