Communist General Counselors Noël Albin, Francis Tujague, and Jacques Victor wanted to respond to the statements made by the President of the General Council Eric Ciotti regarding social welfare fraud, particularly in Nice and its region: “We might have thought that the approach of the holiday season would have calmed the recurring harshness of the General Council President’s stance against the most disadvantaged, notably RSA (Active Solidarity Income, which replaced RMI) recipients.”
According to the communist officials: “Unfortunately, this is not the case, as by submitting a bill to the National Assembly aimed at punishing RSA ‘freeloaders’ more harshly, he takes the opportunity to renew his usual media spectacle of stigmatizing beneficiaries, who are presumed to be ‘potential fraudsters’ by default. He does not hesitate to resort to statistical acrobatics that are deceptive and were denounced by us last year.
We are far from justifying any misuse of public funds, but it is important to put this phenomenon in its proper context: the number of criminal complaints corresponds precisely to less than 6 per thousand of the number of beneficiaries, which is an extremely small minority.
Furthermore, to inflate scanty figures, categories that do not involve fraud, let alone embezzlement, are mixed together, as a recent Constitutional Council decision reminded us.
This is notably the case with overpayments, which mostly originate from errors in processing applications, while overwhelmed services facing a surge in requests see their staff numbers stagnate.
It is also, even more controversially, the refusal to grant rights to many applicants, which in fact accounts for the bulk of the 13.4 million sum advanced by the President of the General Council.
A real sleight of hand, which in itself constitutes statistical fraud, just like the 20 billion figure announced for France when a parliamentary inquiry mission on this subject estimated it to be ten times less!
But what seems even more unbearable to us is to justify this demagogic and unhealthy stance with moralizing platitudes: ‘Fraud is the very negation of the solidarity on which our social protection system is based, as it diverts public money from those for whom this solidarity is intended.’
We clearly do not share the same values, but in this matter, a bit of decency would not be out of place!”
