Out of 862 citizenship income earners audited over a six-month period, 389 had no entitlement. Among them, 191 are affected, three of them for mafia crimes. The Catania carabinieri of the Fontanarossa company discovered this together with INPS officials, at the end of an investigation that began in October last year and ended in March. The damage to the treasury, the investigators explain, is about three million euros.
Most of the beneficiaries who did not have the right were identified in the populous and disadvantaged district of Librino, southern area of the city of Catania, with a population of about 75,000 inhabitants, a quarter of the entire city. Investigators speak of “multiple and evident irregularities committed by undue recipients, with the full awareness of wanting to” deceive “the Italian state”.
According to what was reconstructed in the investigation, for which the 389 were reported for fraud against the State and further disbursement of the benefit was suspended, the applicant claimed to be the only member of the family unit even if this was not true ; this allowed to have the citizenship income even if in reality there was already someone working in the family or it allowed more people of the same family to ask for the “income”. “Emblematic – reconstruct the carabinieri – was the case of a family of 4 whose members, having submitted a single request for citizenship income, failing to declare the exact composition of the family unit and therefore formally” alone “at home, they had managed to grab, from 2020 to 2022, a total sum of € 18,496.75 “.
It is not the only sensational case. In some questions fictitious residences were indicated, as did some Romanian citizens who all used the same address while not living in that house which at times was not even a house but a shop or a countryside area and even an overpass. In some cases the address corresponded to that of a prison where the recipient of the citizenship income had previously “stayed”. In the long list there are also people under house arrest and “illegal” workers, especially on construction sites. Numerous foreign citizens were also controlled, 41 of whom did not have the right to “income”; many of them falsely attested to having been resident in Italy for more than ten years, a requirement required by law to obtain the benefit.
It is not the first operation in Catania involving citizenship income earners. In the last year the same carabinieri have discovered another 250 forgeries, for a tax damage of about one million and 850 thousand euros. In April a year ago, 76 cards were seized to collect citizenship income, some of which were found in the possession of mafia members.