Solidarity fund: Bercy has identified 23,000 "probably undue" payments

The Ministry of the Economy has identified 23,000 "probably undue" payments to companies that have appealed to the solidarity fund, representing a total amount of 30 million euros, he said Tuesday.

Tax audits will assess these cases which may lead to criminal proceedings in the event of proven fraud, said the office of the Minister of Public Accounts Olivier Dussopt, confirming information from RTL.

680,000 applications filed for the month of December

This control and verification process has already enabled the State to recover 3 million euros of unduly paid aid.

The government wants "to fight against all fraud so that a euro spent is a euro useful to the economy and not to fraudsters", underlined the cabinet of Olivier Dussopt.

At present, 300,000 aid requests are still "subject to verification by the dedicated unit" made up of 50 agents.

In total, 680,000 compensation claims have been filed for the month of December since January 15, Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire told the Senate Economic Affairs Committee.

"We noted a lot of fraud with manual controls"

He specified that "all requests over 30,000 euros are subject to manual control" and that, out of 2,600 of these requests processed (out of 4,600 received) during the second half of January, "two thirds have been rejected ".

"We noted with these manual controls a lot of fraud", declared Bruno Le Maire, for example repeated requests made for the same month with different reference turnover or "entrepreneurs who requested large sums then that there was no declaration of turnover in previous years ".

Bruno Le Maire announced on Monday the recruitment of 250 additional contractors to strengthen this unit and speed up the processing of requests.

The solidarity fund set up to support companies in difficulty in the context of the health crisis has benefited two million companies for an amount of 14 billion euros since April.