Ministry of Social Policy ‘Ignoring’ Fraudulent Welfare Payments

The Ministry of Social Policy (MSP) is ignoring notifications from the Ministry of Finance on social benefits that it identified as suspicious during a verification process, according to DT.UA.

The MSP reportedly provided responses only to 4 thousand out of 514 thousand notifications on suspicious social benefit payments made by the Ministry of Finance. DT.UA claims that the MSP is to blame, as it addressed less than 1% of notifications.

A total of 22 million social benefits were examined, and over 200 thousand violations were identified by the Ministry of Finance during January-June 2016. These are payments made to accounts of people who passed away or closed their taxpayer IDs or provided false documents.

Among these 514 thousand improper payments, 52% are subsidies for utility bills, 26% are social benefits to internally displaced people, 12% are pensions and 8% are unemployment benefits.

DT.UA highlights that the Ministry of Finance was not provided access to all government databases and registries necessary to verify social benefits, including the register of civil status, register of vehicles, register of constituents, etc.

For instance, the Ministry of Finance verified payments to 155 thousand internally displaced persons. It was found out that only 57 thousand of them crossed the contact line [Ed.: which is a necessary condition to be eligible for this social benefit], hence, payments to the other 98 thousand persons are suspicious.

Source: Ukrayinska Pravda