Citizens’ applications for the transition from citizenship income to the inclusion allowance, the new income support desired by the Meloni government and operational from this year, have more than halved. This was announced by Enasc, the Unsic patronage (member of Cnel), among the first in Italy in terms of volume of processing of social and social security practices. This year, 39,480 applications for the Inclusion Allowance (Adi) were forwarded by Enasc until 31 May 2024, of which approximately half were accepted. According to the body’s estimates, by the end of the year they could reach 50 thousand. Applications for citizenship income between 2020 and 2022 to Enasc averaged around 130 thousand. In the transition from the RdC to the Adi, Unsic therefore estimates a drop of 62% in applications at the end of the year and around 75% fewer recipients of support. “The drop in applicants is a consequence of the more complex and selective procedures for accessing the ADI – he explains Domenico Mamone, president of Unsic and Cnel councilor. “If the citizen’s income was a benefit initially provided on the basis of the information self-declared by the user, with the checks postponed to a subsequent phase, the ADI provides for multiple preliminary checks to guarantee the correctness of the information declared and find confirmation in the various databases available to the Ministry of Labour”.
The pool of possible beneficiaries of the ADI is also reduced by the significantly lower ISEE amount and by a lower asset value than that provided for by the citizen’s income. “The transition between the two instruments is confirmed to be characterized by a real change of direction – continues Mamone. “The ADI is obtained by a group of truly disadvantaged, disabled or in difficulty subjects, who must present substantial documentation issued by a public body, sign a Digital Activation Agreement (Pad) indicating three employment agencies and accepting a path of taken charge. In short, everything is longer and more selective than the citizen’s income and for the checks we can finally get ahead of the game thanks to data cross-referencing and the IT backbone”.
In fact, the season of controls on the illegal acquisition of citizenship income is far from over. The amount of work for the Prosecutor’s Office is currently considerable and, in collaboration with the Financial Police, they continue to detect multiple inconsistencies. One of the main frauds linked to unpaid debts concerns the deceptive residences in Italy by citizens living abroad and to create single-family units (among the most sensational recent cases is the discovery of the presence of 50 residents in the same address), but also false purchases in points of sale to certify residence in Italy for at least ten years by non-EU citizens. Then there is the complacency of traders such as ATMs in exchange for a percentage and false tax declarations.
Among the most recent cases, the 40 “crafty” people discovered in Bologna and the 43 in Lecce last October, the ninety people reported in the province of Catania and the 73 in the province of Caltanissetta at the beginning of the year, the 285 non-EU citizens linked to a grocery store that laundered income emerged in Naples in February, the over 600 reported in the province of Varese and the 18 in the province of Pisa last March, the 63 in the province of Foggia in May. Based on data from the Guardia di Finanza relating to the period from April 2019 to the first half of 2023, the map of irregularities sees Calabria in first place in percentage, followed by Marche, Liguria, Piedmont/Valle d’Aosta, Umbria and Veneto, but Lombardy is in the lead in terms of subjects reported and amount of fraud verified, followed by Campania and Sicily. The most virtuous is clearly Trentino-Alto Adige, followed by Abruzzo, Molise, Basilicata, Tuscany, Sardinia, Emilia-Romagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Lazio.
