A DEMAGOGICAL SOCIAL ANTI-FRAUD PLAN ?

"This is a ten-year project for which I am setting a first stage: in 2027, we will have twice as many results as in 2022", he says, promising the creation of a thousand additional jobs during this five-year period. and an investment of 1 billion euros in information systems, "in particular to better cross-check data".
Adjustments have already increased by 35% over the past five years. These announcements come three weeks after a first plan, presented in an interview with Le Monde, centered on the fight against tax evasion.

"Our desire is to look at where the situations of fraud are and respond to them, without stigmatization, without instrumentalization", affirmed Mr. Attal to journalists, and "to be neither in denial of a large part of the left nor in the lies of much of the far right".

Fraud to social benefits alone is estimated at between 6 billion and 8 billion euros per year, according to the Court of Auditors. “Social fraud, like tax evasion, is a form of hidden tax on working French people,” the minister told Le Parisien.

Merge Vitale card and identity card

Gabriel Attal explains that he wants to "reinforce" the conditions of residence in France "to benefit from social allowances". It will now be necessary to spend nine months of the year in the country, against six currently planned, to benefit from family allowances or the minimum old age. Similarly, for personalized housing allowances (APL), which only require eight months of presence for the time being.

Another announcement, with potentially concrete repercussions for the French: the government is considering a merger between the Vitale card and the identity card in order to fight against fraud in health benefits. "We can imagine a model where, from a certain date, when you redo your identity card, it automatically becomes your Vitale card", specifies the minister. He adds that a prefiguration mission would be launched by the summer and could reach conclusions by the end of the year. By the way, the idea of ​​a biometric Vitale card seems to have been abandoned, especially given its cost.
Bercy also wants to target retirees living outside European borders in order to better identify those who have died but whose allowances are still being collected. This announcement follows an experiment carried out since September 2022 in Algeria, during which 300 files of "quasi-centenarian" retirees out of 1,000 cases studied were declared non-compliant, affirms the minister, recalling that more than a million pensions were paid abroad, half of them outside Europe.

If no one denies that social fraud exists in France, it is however necessary to put its importance into perspective. The maintenance of this fantasy , according to which France would be full of potential fraudsters, has several objectives, among which that of delaying structural reforms and that of always reinforcing the repressive arsenal of the administration...

To fight against fraud, shouldn't it be necessary, above all and above all, to carry out a radical simplification of the social aid system ?