The Minister of Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal. SARAH MEYSSONNIER / REUTERS
In an interview at Parisianthe Minister of Public Accounts detailed the figures for tax, social and customs fraud in 2022.
The Minister of Public Accounts boasts of “historical results”. Gabriel Attal detailed, in an interview with Parisian , the figures for tax, social and customs fraud, in 2022. The government intends to recover the record sum of 14.6 billion euros for tax fraud, the Minister of Accounts announced on Wednesday. “This is 1.2 billion more than in 2021 which was already a record year”, he confirms. The so-called cases «graves»files “which result in penalties of more than 40%”are on the rise, says Gabriel Attal.
316 million euros in fraud avoided for health insurance
VAT fraud represents 2.2 billion euros in recovery against 1.5 billion in 2021, says Gabriel Attal who recognizes that this is the area where the government “must make the most progress”. INSEE estimates that VAT irregularities amount to between 20 and 26 billion euros (based on 2012 data). “A real shift will take place in July 2024 when electronic invoicing between companies will start to be put in place”. Undeclared work and posted work led to 790 million euros in recovery in 2022.
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“Regarding health insurance, we detected and avoided 316 million euros in fraud in 2022 compared to 252 million euros the previous year, i.e. a 44% increase”, welcomed the Minister. Family allowances, housing allowances, RSA … fraud in CAF benefits is also in the sights of Bercy controllers with 49,000 cases detected for 351 million euros “detected or avoided”.
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640 tonnes of tobacco seized
Gabriel Attal also returned to the ban on the payment of allowances to non-European bank accounts for the month of July 2023, announced on October 20 with the same objective of combating fraud. This will apply in particular to the ASPA (solidarity allowance for the elderly), family benefits, the RSA or the supplementary disability allowance. “In the fraud plan that I will present at the end of the first quarter, I want to go further”he explains in the columns of the daily, citing as an example the systematic verification of people for the payment of pensions.
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Tobacco and cigarette smuggling, finally, “explode” according to the minister, “with a new record: more than 640 tonnes seized, compared to 400 tonnes in 2021”. “The mafia networks that were in narcotics are now turning to tobacco. The income there is significant but today, the penal sanctions are lighter. With the Minister of Justice, I therefore work to punish traffickers of cigarettes as harshly as those of drugs.said the Minister to Parisian. Gabriel Attal also took the opportunity to highlight the effectiveness of control, now helped by new technologies: “For the first time, more than one out of two tax audits was guided by artificial intelligence, which makes it possible to identify anomalies thanks to the cross-referencing of data”.