Pierre Moscovici, first President of the Court of Auditors, on 06/30/2020.

-

MEIGNEUX ROMUALD / SIPA

For lack of being able to "quantify in a sufficiently reliable way" the fraud to social benefits, the Court of Auditors formulates in a report published Thursday, 15 proposals aiming to better "measure the extent" of the phenomenon and to "dry up the possibilities".

The subject of fantasies and controversies, the amount of social fraud remains incalculable.

After a parliamentary report which concluded at the end of 2019 that the task was “materially impossible”, the Senate had ordered an investigation on the subject from the Court of Auditors.

The financial magistrates arrived at the same conclusion, as recognized by their first president, Pierre Moscovici, during a hearing before the commission of social affairs of the upper assembly: "What it is not possible to quantify sufficiently reliably, we do not quantify it in our report ”.

Cross-reference social, tax and banking files

Despite the billion euros of "damage suffered or avoided" in 2019 by the Social Security and Pôle Emploi, "social organizations are losing significant sums", he nonetheless asserted, likening the passage to fraud and "simple errors".

Pierre Moscovici therefore firstly asked the administrations concerned to "estimate the amount of the fraud in all cases".

Without waiting for the results, he judged "possible to dry out at the source a large part of the risks of fraud" by crossing in all directions the social, fiscal, banking, but also consular and school files, in order to verify the identities and income of beneficiaries.

Health Insurance is in particular asked to clean up its some 3 million insured persons residing less than 6 months per year in France, and among the 152,000 still holding "several active Vitale cards".

Strengthen controls

Health professionals and hospitals are also in the crosshairs of the Court of Auditors, which wants to "develop electronic prescribing", multiply "automated checks" of invoices and facilitate the "de-subsidization" of caregivers at fault.

Rare thing, the institution also recommends to "reinforce the staff devoted to carrying out checks", today of the order of 4,000 full-time equivalents, and to create a "specialized unit (...) in the repression of acts criminals and cybercrime ”.

Economy

Taxes: Artificial intelligence helps make tax audits more efficient

Economy

Coronavirus: The Paris prosecutor's office is investigating "massive" short-time work fraud

  • Economy

  • Fraud

  • Tax fraud

  • Public finances

  • Social fraud