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The email address alone does not bode well.
The Investitionsbank Berlin (IBB) informs all entrepreneurs in the city who have received Corona aid in the past twelve months with the sender corona-belehrungen@ibb.de: that there may have been more money than they are entitled to.
"We ask you to compare the funds you have used with your actual needs," says the letter - combined with the reminder that you only gave an estimate of the liquidity requirements for the next few months when you applied for it.
Whoever got through the crisis better than feared should transfer the overpaid aid back to the IBB account.
An account number, the intended use "(partial) repayment" and the instruction that "incorrect information relevant to the decision in the context of your application for the corona subsidy constitute several criminal offenses" are also mentioned in the letter.
In addition, it is reminded that the emergency aid received is to be included in the 2020 tax return as income - an automatic notification of the aid ex officio to the tax authorities is possible, it continues.
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This form of retrospective control with gentle pressure apparently works well not only in Berlin, as current figures from the Federal Ministry of Economics show on the first aid that was given at all: the emergency aid from spring 2020. According to this, almost every tenth euro subsidy has been received nationwide to date of self-employed people and small business owners.
The ministry informed WELT AM SONNTAG that so far there have been 113,142 voluntary repayments amounting to 801.7 million euros, which have flowed back into the federal budget through the federal states' approval offices.
In addition, the federal states could have “obtained” 44,186 repayments based on repayment claims amounting to 291.4 million euros.
That makes a total of 1.1 billion euros, which were repaid by 157,000 companies. Originally, the federal government had disbursed emergency aid amounting to around 13.7 billion euros to 1.8 million addresses through the federal states. The numbers can still increase. According to the ministry, the final reports from the federal states on the intended use of the Corona emergency aid are to be submitted by December 31, 2021.