Carte Vitale, allowances… What the government plan contains

2023-05-29 22:25:33

Allocations, Vitale card, retirees abroad… The Minister Delegate in charge of Public Accounts Gabriel Attal unveiled on Monday May 29 a vast plan to fight against social fraud which should make it possible to save money and double the adjustments by 2027. These announcements come three weeks after a first plan centered on the fight against tax evasion.

But one of them, the merger of the Vitale card with the identity card, has apparently not been the subject of consultation within the government, an executive from the Ministry of the Interior reacted immediately and caution against such action “technically impossible”. “Social fraud, like tax evasion, is a form of hidden tax on working French people”said Gabriel Attal in an interview with Parisian.

Fraud to social benefits alone is estimated at between 6 and 8 billion euros per year according to the Court of Auditors. The Minister is giving himself ten years to carry out the project, with a first stage, consisting in obtaining, in 2027, “twice as many results as in 2022”. Adjustments have already increased by 35% over the past five years.

Merger between Vitale card and identity card

For this, he promises the creation of a thousand additional jobs during this five-year period and an investment of one billion euros in information systems. The Minister detailed a whole series of measures in the more or less short term. In particular, he wants ” to strenghten “ 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, indicates the minister. The same goes for APL (personalized housing assistance), which today only requires eight months of presence.

Gabriel Attal intends to increase the means of Urssaf to limit fraud to employers’ contributions. Another announcement, with potentially concrete repercussions on 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.

Target pensioners living outside the EU

“We can imagine a model where, from a certain date, when you redo your identity card, it automatically becomes your Vitale card”said the Minister during an exchange with journalists, adding that a prefiguration mission would be launched by the summer and could lead to conclusions by the end of the year.

By the way, the idea of ​​a biometric Vitale card seems abandoned, especially given its cost. “We discover the Vitale card-identity card merger measure which is clearly technically impossible to implement and for which the Cnil is deeply opposed”said a Place Beauvau executive in the evening.

“Be careful not to infringe on data protection or individual freedoms and not to create hype. The solution remains the biometric Vitale card which has been voted and which must be put in place”added this framework.

Bercy also wants to target retirees living outside European borders in order to better identify deceased people who would still be paid benefits. The Minister recalled that more than one million pensions were paid abroad, half of them outside Europe, and 300,000 in Algeria.