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Policemen in downtown Duisburg: NRW granted emergency aid of around 4.5 billion euros
Photo: Christoph Reichwein (crei) / imago images / Reichwein
North Rhine-Westphalia wanted to help companies and the self-employed in the corona crisis quickly and unbureaucratically - and, unlike other federal states, granted the maximum amount for its immediate aid without a major examination.
Since then, the authorities have been trying to get back too much tax money that has been paid out.
But that's not all.
Now the public prosecutor's offices in Germany's most populous federal state are also investigating thousands of cases on suspicion of fraud when receiving this corona aid.
It is about at least "4203 cases of subsidy fraud in connection with the corona pandemic," as stated in a report by Justice Minister Peter Biesenbach (CDU) to the Düsseldorf state parliament.
With reference to the police processing systems, damage of more than 30.1 million euros is said to have occurred.
Overall, just under one percent of all around 430,000 approved applications from solo self-employed people and small businesses could be fraud.
Overall, North Rhine-Westphalia granted emergency aid amounting to around 4.5 billion euros.
The actual number of cases of fraud may be higher.
According to the report, the individual law enforcement authorities on the Rhine and Ruhr together even reported more than 5,200 investigations in connection with possible subsidy fraud.
The front runner is therefore the Cologne Public Prosecutor's Office with 1041 preliminary investigations and a stated amount of damage of eleven million euros, followed by Düsseldorf with 500 proceedings.
The prosecutors in Essen report 440, those in Münster 412 proceedings.
According to the Aachen Public Prosecutor's Office - 277 preliminary investigations - most of the suspected cases can be traced back to reports from banks suspecting money laundering.
The accused are accused of having given false information in their applications, in particular "whether a trade existed, whether the trade was carried out as the main occupation, whether economic difficulties existed before March 1, 2020".
Companies with up to five employees would have been entitled to up to 9,000 euros, companies with up to ten employees up to 15,000 euros.
Medium-sized companies with up to 50 employees should receive up to 25,000 euros.
Fished data from fake websites
There are also attempts at fraud with the help of so-called fake websites.
For this purpose, fraudsters had created their own websites with application forms for Corona emergency aid, which looked confusingly similar to the official application pages.
But anyone who entered their data on the website in the hope of immediate help did not receive any money.
It can be assumed that the websites »data of the applicants have been spied out«, says the new report on the cases.
In other words: Fraudsters used the data to apply for immediate Corona aid on the real websites themselves.
The Central Office for Cybercrime (ZAC) in Cologne is investigating the as yet unknown people behind the fake websites.
A public prosecutor for the ZAC announced that actual payments to the fraudsters resulted in damage of 299,000 euros according to the current state of the investigation.
More than 280 proceedings are being conducted with public prosecutors throughout North Rhine-Westphalia, according to which those affected or injured who had used the wrong pages have reported them, according to the current report to the legal committee.
The actual number of fraud investigations into fake websites is likely to be even higher as not all prosecutors provided detailed information on their investigations.
Because of the fake websites, North Rhine-Westphalia had to temporarily stop the disbursement of the emergency aid.
The State Criminal Police Office warned at the time that the pages were being placed prominently through advertisements in search engines.
Opposition criticizes the emergency aid program
The opposition in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia criticizes the state government's emergency aid program: "From the start, it was not so lucky," says André Stinka, a member of the SPD state parliament.
“Everything had to happen very quickly back then, that was a good thing and everyone wanted it that way.
But many mistakes happened quickly and were overlooked by the Ministry of Economic Affairs. "The district governments were" partly heavily overloaded "on the subject.
The authorities across Germany will soon start another payment procedure - for the restaurateurs or fitness studio operators affected by the second shutdown.
The federal states can now show that they can cope with this second wave of applications more confidently.
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