I think you are missing something on your end.

I created a directory, relative to this script:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;

&find(\&wanted, 'find_tmp');

sub wanted {
        /^foo$/ && print("$_\n");
}
[download]

I create the directory find_tmp and three directories inside of it -- each one contained two touched files, foo and bar. I set the permissions of one of those directories to 000 and ran the script:

[jeffa@server1 perl]$ ./foo.pl
foo
Can't cd to (find_tmp/) cannot: Permission denied
 at ./foo.pl line 9
foo

Looks like File::Find is indeed skipping directories as advertised -- that is, it is not die'ing when it cannot access them due to permissions. (Are you really sure you have the proper permissions?) If you redirect STDERR, you won't get the warning messages:

[jeffa@server1 perl]$ ./foo.pl 2>/dev/null
foo
foo