The failure of citizenship income. With the decrees of Conte is a boom of cunning – Time

Decrees issued by the Conte government to deal with the pandemic have increased undeclared workers who take income from citizenship. The Parliamentary Budget Office (Upb), an independent oversight body of the government’s public finances, writes it clearly, at the center of the Ristori decrees published on December 3.

Whether there are illegal workers who take advantage of it and earn income from citizenship is no mystery. La Guardia di Finanza constantly conducts investigations to find and sting the crafters of the measure of financial support desired by the 5 Stars. The novelty is that the executive’s actions to counter the Covid emergency would have favored the astute. This is what the technicians of the Upb write: “Subjects affected by the pandemic, within the requirements of the Rdc when presenting a current ISEE, may have opted for the Rdc if it were more generous than the Rem (circumstance that occurs especially for people without income for rent). Furthermore, the temporary disappearance of the conditions linked to labor obligations may have led those who in the past were not willing to submit to such obligations (such as undeclared workers) to request the Rdc ”.

Obviously there are no reliable data, since it is not possible to know how many workers of this type, precisely because they are “submerged”, have benefited from financial support. The UPB, however, also specifies which are these government measures that may have favored those who were previously careful not to ask for income. And mention dl 18/2020 and dl 34/2020. They are the famous Cura Italia (decree approved in March and converted into law in April) and the Relaunch Decree (approved in May and converted in July), which “ordered the two-month suspension of the social reintegration obligations and labor, which have been extended for another two months.

Thanks to these four months of “hole”, therefore, there would have been many illegal workers who would have taken advantage of it. Under normal conditions, in fact, in order to be granted citizenship income, one must submit to certain “conditionalities.” That is, as the government’s exclusive website says, it is necessary to give “immediate availability for work, adherence to a personalized path of accompaniment to labor insertion and social inclusion that may include community service activities, for career requalification or completion. studies as well as other commitments aimed at job placement and social inclusion. ”Taking training courses or doing socially useful work is a big problem for those who already have undeclared work. Without this obstacle, income has become more attractive .

This does not mean that the growth in applicants in 2020 is primarily due to conditions of real economic hardship. Some figures: “The families benefited by the DRC have increased significantly since the first months of the pandemic – writes the UPB – from some 940 thousand in February 2020 to more than 1.2 million in September (296,000 units, an increase of more than 30%). Beneficiaries in the DRC decreased in October (about 900,000 families), to return to about 1.1 million in November in correspondence with the increase in infections and the new restrictive measures. “This increase also continued in December, as evidenced by the INPS Observatory, which in the report updated to December 4 quantifies the households that receive income from citizenship at 1,592,930.

The technicians of the parliamentary office also photograph a reality: the territorial division of those who receive the DRC and compare it with another measure of economic support, emergency income (Rem). If the first is a grill mark, the second is a flag of the Democratic Party. We see how the first is strongly located in the South, while the second in the Center-North. In fact, Campania is home to a fifth (20.9% of all Italy’s beneficiaries). But also 18.1% in Sicily and 9.1% in Puglia. While Rem has higher percentages than the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Lombardy (9.2 versus 8.5%), in Calabria (7.5 and 6.5%) and in Lazio (10.8 and 9.7 %). The technicians, however, underline another criticality: “The Rem has allowed some excluded subjects from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to benefit from some support measures; however, the simultaneous increase in usage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo suggests that there has actually been some degree of overlap between the two institutes. “