A CAF agency. (drawing) – ALLILI MOURAD / SIPA
The national family allowances fund (Cnaf) will have 30 inspectors specializing in tracking down the most important frauds, committed by organized gangs or in several departments, its leaders announced on Thursday. The network of 101 departmental funds already has 680 inspectors responsible for detecting errors (in good faith) or fraud (intentional), but “we have deemed it useful to equip ourselves with a complementary, more specialized strike force capable of act beyond the limits of a department, ”Cnaf Director General Vincent Mazauric explained at a press conference.
These new specialist agents will be based in teams of six in Lille, Strasbourg, Melun, Toulon and Bordeaux. Half of them were recruited from traditional auditors, the other half from outside – one can count among them former tax officers or ex-private detectives. They will be responsible for detecting “high-stake fraud”, “sophisticated” operations committed “in an organized gang” and often “on a larger scale than the department”. They relate more to “predation” than to “situational opportunism”, according to the Cnaf.
No quantified targets for this new device
This may be the case of delinquents who use false identities to obtain benefits in several departments – one of them has thus scoured 54 CAF out of the 101 in the country -, or who canvass (sometimes) good beneficiaries. faith and encourage them to request an undue allowance, from which they will then deduct a “commission”. Specialized inspectors will also have to act against sleep merchants, who buy real estate at low prices and rent them out to vulnerable people by paying themselves with housing allowances. However, when the housing conditions are unworthy, the CAF is entitled to suspend its payments to “stop the gear from which the owner takes advantage”, argued Vincent Mazauric.
During deployment, the new control system has not been assigned any quantified objective. A fraudster “taken out of the circuit, it has a social value that cannot be measured in money alone”, commented Vincent Mazauric. In 2020, CAF controllers detected 36,917 frauds for a total of 255.5 million euros, according to a report released Thursday. This is a decrease of 21% compared to 2019, which is explained by the “temporary suspension of control operations” during the health crisis.
Much more than fraud, which remains marginal – they concerned 0.27% of beneficiaries in 2020 -, the checks have above all made it possible to identify errors, unintentional, which for a third of them have also been rectified in the past. benefit of beneficiaries. The CAF thus recovered nearly 829 million euros overdue, but also paid more than 285 million reminders of rights to users.