The Minister Delegate for Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, unveiled, in an interview with Le Parisien published Monday evening, May 29, a plan to fight against social fraud.
"It's a ten-year project for which I'm setting a first step: 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 to 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 valued 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.
Pensioners living outside European borders
Gabriel Attal explains that he wants to "strengthen" 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 continue to receive benefits. This announcement follows an experiment carried out since September 2022 in Algeria, during which 300 files of "almost centenarian" retirees out of 1,000 cases studied were declared non-compliant, says the Minister, recalling that more than a million pensions were paid abroad, half of them outside Europe.
Gabriel Attal also intends to increase the resources of Urssaf to limit fraud in employers' contributions. In addition, the plan provides for the payment at source of the contributions of microentrepreneurs by the platforms that make them work, like Uber or Deliveroo, because a certain number under-declare, which represents according to the Minister " a social time bomb" as they don't contribute enough.
