Model test in Düren
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NRW relies on digital school certificates against child benefit fraud
According to the state government, there are no reliable figures on the extent of the abuse of services in North Rhine-Westphalia (symbol picture).
Photo: dpa / Monika Skolimowska
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Düsseldorf The authorities are aware that social benefits are being sneaked into fraudulently for children who do not live here or some of whom do not even exist. Fake school certificates play an important role in gaining child benefit. NRW wants to put a stop to this – Düren should help.
North Rhine-Westphalia is testing in 99 schools in three model municipalities whether digitized school certificates can rule out child benefit fraud. Forged school certificates are being misused “to steal child benefit,” said NRW Local Minister Ina Scharrenbach (CDU) in Düsseldorf on Monday.
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This should be remedied by school certificates with analog and digital security features, which provide the family funds with QR code-encrypted information about the authenticity of the certificate. In a six-month model test in the three municipalities of Gelsenkirchen, Düren and Horn-Bad Meinberg is to be tested to determine whether the digitized certificates are forgery-proof.
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According to the state government, there are no reliable figures on the extent of service abuse in North Rhine-Westphalia. Last year, however, the NRW project “Missimo” for the cities of Krefeld and Gelsenkirchen showed that social fraud often has a system, explained Scharrenbach.
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For Krefeld alone, damage of around 1.7 million euros was extrapolated if wrongly granted child benefits were continued to be paid until the age of 18 in around 80 cases without strict examination standards, said the head of the family benefits office in North Rhine-Westphalia, Sören Haack. “The application for child benefit is accompanied – primarily by applicants from south-east Europe – by submitting forged school certificates.”
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So far it has only been possible for the family benefits “with considerable effort” to identify originals and forgeries and to prevent the improper granting of child benefit. Sometimes fraud is noticed through spelling mistakes or a changed logo of the “certificate”, sometimes through the fact that the age of the child does not match the type of school.
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Haack spoke of “migration through the child benefit system”. Some families are in Germany, Spain and England on a “constant round trip” in order to steal child benefit everywhere. Checks on a case-by-case basis had shown that children sometimes only showed up in a school for a short time and were then no longer seen – not even when the regulatory authorities visited the registered apartments.
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The state government has also sought contact with other federal states in the fight against child benefit fraud, said Scharrenbach. In addition to North Rhine-Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are particularly affected by immigration – in NRW and Lower Saxony particularly promoted by the influx of workers in meat processing and logistics. The focus is also on cross-border living and working relationships between North Rhine-Westphalia and the Netherlands.
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So far there is no uniform standard for school certificates, explained Scharrenbach. The perpetrators took advantage of this through self-issued certificates of school attendance by children, “some of whom do not even exist or who have long since ceased to live in Germany with their parents.”
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Thomas Hissel, head of the social affairs department in Düren, sees the fight against fraud in social benefits as an important element in bringing city quarters that have got into difficulties back into balance. To the extent that child benefit fraudsters have professionalized, the practice of the registration authorities must now also be professionalized, he emphasized. There is also a special need for action in Gelsenkirchen, said Mayor Karin Welge (SPD). Every tenth student from the EU East area is now here.
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Scharrenbach assumes that the digitized school certificate, which was developed together with the three family funds in North Rhine-Westphalia and the family fund management in Nuremberg, can be offered anywhere in North Rhine-Westphalia if it proves to be forgery-proof in the model test. The project does not cause any additional costs, but will be done with the existing resources, she said.
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School Minister Yvonne Gebauer (FDP) hopes that the system will also be able to create and access forgery-proof certificates in the future. The FDP politician spoke of an important milestone in the digitization process.
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