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Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) - North Rhine-Westphalia is testing in three model municipalities whether digitized school certificates can rule out child benefit fraud.
Fake school certificates are being misused "to steal child benefit," said NRW Local Minister Ina Scharrenbach (CDU) in Düsseldorf on Monday.
This should be remedied by school certificates with analog and digital security features, which provide the family funds with QR code-encrypted information about the authenticity of the certificate.
A six-month model test in the three municipalities of Gelsenkirchen, Düren and Horn-Bad Meinberg is to test whether the digital certificates are forgery-proof.
According to the state government, there are no reliable figures on the extent of service abuse in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Last year, however, the NRW project "Missimo" for the cities of Krefeld and Gelsenkirchen showed that social fraud often has a system, explained Scharrenbach.
For Krefeld alone, damage of around 1.7 million euros has been extrapolated if wrongly granted child benefit is continued to be paid until the age of 18 without strict examination standards, said the head of the family benefits office in North Rhine-Westphalia, Sören Haack.
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© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210329-99-12574 / 2
Press release