Sébastien Laye is an entrepreneur and associate researcher at the Thomas More Institute.
"Truth is not exactitude", said Octave Mirabeau, and both Zemmour and BFM gave us an illustration of this during the Mélenchon-Zemmour debate.
On this occasion, one of the passes between the two tribunes focused on the issue of social fraud, a controversy soon explained by the famous
fact-checkers
of BFMTV.
Regarding the issue of the imbalance of public finances and our abysmal debt, everything now happens as if two ideological camps in France had found their martingale, stuck with constancy to the point of ineptitude, out of true laziness on the issue ( in fact, inability or unwillingness to imagine ways of reducing public spending). Thus, on the left or among Marxist cryptos, we are given extravagant figures on tax evasion, often confusing real fraud and optimization or even the simple internationalization of investments. And when one leans more to the right on the political spectrum, the counterpart in terms of magic thought of this tax fraud, would be the social fraud.
The two parties - one interested in a pure right-wing economic marker, also with the AME, the other in fact-checking often of poor quality but intended to impress - were clearly more in the ideology than in the to analyse.
Sebastien Laye
Thus, like certain officials of the Republicans or the RN, Zemmour wanted to address the issue of social fraud, the resolution of which would be the keystone of the balance of public finances according to our apprentice economist. On the set, he put forward without any justification a figure of 50 billion that the
fact checkers
of BFM brought back in a subsequent sequence to… .1 billion! While we can accept differences of view or analysis on a subject (this is characteristic of
political
disputatio
), this difference from 1 to 50 does not seem serious and has had enough to confuse the audience of the 'emission.
However, in economics we cannot confuse everything and thus manipulate the figures, even on a question of the underground economy, which by definition is never exactly quantifiable (just like tax fraud or the number of illegal immigrants, or still undeclared work).
The two parties - one interested in a pure right-wing economic marker, also with the AME, the other in
fact-checking
often of poor quality but intended to impress - were clearly more in the ideology than in the to analyse.
Read alsoLess controlled, social fraud has fallen
And to tell the truth, without explaining it, they were not talking about the same subject. Zemmour spoke of social fraud, taking up the work of Charles Prats, which can be defined as the activity of individuals benefiting from French social assistance when they are not entitled to it. We will come back to the methodology to identify and then quantify these cases and their cost for our public finances. BFMTV spoke that evening about the abuse of social security, that is to say the cost of unjustified interventions and reimbursements from legitimate policyholders. The two issues are completely different, one is a citizenship issue, the other a technical issue of controlling reimbursements and acts.
It is therefore appropriate to take up here again, in the terms of the real economic and social debate, the question of social fraud.
Behind these abuses, there are in fact potentially 2.5 million phantom individuals who use a vital card and receive reimbursement for care, allowances etc.….
They would cost, if we attempt an estimate, between 10 and 30 billion in the broad sense, probably around 15 billion per year.
If we want to be realistic, we can estimate the number of unjustified vital cards at 2 million.
Sebastien Laye
Social Security claims that these abuses cost it only a few hundred million per year, but that there are 600,000 excess vital cards: it generally defends itself by saying that these cards, although activated, are not all used (because nothing that 600,000 vital cards accepted lip service, for an average annual health expenditure of 10,000 euros, that makes 6 billion per year….). These cards are overwhelmingly located abroad.
Social Security also indicates that there are 12 million of our social insureds born abroad or residing abroad, benefiting or potentially benefiting from some form of social benefit. Most of these people have a legitimate right to a vital card: people born abroad who have worked and paid contributions in France, French citizens living abroad, dual nationals, etc. ... The problem is that when we count these different separately. categories, we never find the 12 million of social security. There are between 2 and 2.5 million people who cannot be identified. These are so-called ghost individuals, or who have managed to have several vital cards (among the legitimate ones). There are also probably ghosts who managed to get multiple vital cards.
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But we are fortunate to have another set of statistics that comes to us from INSEE, which does its best to identify NIRs, people abroad with an active vital card: INSEE finds some. … .8.5 million!
We certainly know the failings of this Institute but how to justify this gap of 3.5 million people with Social Security?
These two clusters of clues therefore point, if we want to be realistic, on approximately 2 million unjustified vital cards (there are also French people abroad, with activated vital cards, who do not use them. was my case during long years of expatriation).
We must now ask ourselves how much they cost us. On average, a French person receives around 10,000-11,000 euros per year in transfers and services. If the holders of these cards behave in the same way, it is therefore legitimate to think that the total cost of these fake cards oscillates at most between 20 billion and 27.5 billion per year. Prats throws us to graze different scenarios in his works (by definition on a question of underground economy, anything is possible) all very well documented: but some are more realistic than others, because once again an activated card does not mean
ipso facto
an expenditure of 10,000 euros in the year.
It is not impractical to ask our citizens to come to a counter every 3-4 years to renew the vital card.
Sebastien Laye
We believe, however, that the order of magnitude is correct, that it amounts to tens of billions, without reaching the 50 billion mentioned by Zemmour, which is a bit of a worst-case scenario in the analyzes on the subject.
20 billion is still the equivalent of a 25% drop in the CSG!
There is therefore a significant potential for reducing public spending.
Whether the source of reduction in public spending is here a few billion or several tens of billions, this question is secondary to that of the practical methods of recovery, like any fraud. We therefore offer a simple solution to eradicate it: as we have perfectly agreed to regularly renew our credit cards and even our passports, with biometric identification processes, we should agree to do the same with our vital cards. After all, this card is similar to a credit card with a medical consumer loan of around 10,000 euros per year. It is not impractical to ask our citizens to come to a counter every 3-4 years to have it renewed,with tamper-proof biometric identification.
