Citizenship income: the applications of the crafty rejected by the INPS

MILANO – While the government works with the Maneuver on the introduction of strong stakes to reduce and then extinguish the citizen’s income, INPS comes out with a note in which it points out how its system of controls has led to foiling potential distortions in the benefit of income support.

The Institute acknowledges that the RDC has often been the subject of “extensive debate” and “particular media attention”, in particular due to the emergence of fraud and illicit credits. And he recalls that he has gradually intensified ex ante controls, hand in hand with the evolution of the law, and in particular from an “anti-fraud” perspective. It has developed risk scenarios to block applications “symptomatic of the presumed non-existence of one or more requirements by the applicant (or the family unit) and other potentially incompatible situations and to promptly adopt the consequent rejection measures.

In particular, the main risk scenarios concern:

1. lack of residence requirement in Italy;
2. false or omitted declarations regarding the working position of family members;
3. false statements about the composition of the family nucleus.

When the Inps systems detect applications that present a risk indicator associated with these cases, the applications are immediately rejected by the procedure that manages the measure. They can be suspended in cases where it is necessary to see clearly, “in any case always in advance of the payment of the benefit”. The results of this ex-ante activity, INPS still claims, “made it possible to identify over 290,000 of the approximately 1,290,000 applications received in the first ten months of 2022: the vast majority, 240,000, referred to the first two scenarios and was automatically rejected before the performance could be unduly received”. Another 50,000 applications were suspended and subjected to further checks.

The effectiveness of the controls – explains a note – is proven by the data shown in the attached table which highlights the number of applications rejected, lapsed and revoked as at 30 September 2022.

To these cases, INPS says it has added another risk scenario: that relating to the possible ownership of businesses and/or qualifications/social positions by members of the family unit requesting the benefit. In fact, this circumstance, although not in itself incompatible with the use of the CI benefit, is considered symptomatic of potential frauds in any case connected to the use of the Citizenship Income or to irregularities concerning the business sector, such as, for example, those of “nominees ” in their ownership. Requests attributable to this scenario are also intercepted and subjected to further checks.