France on the cheat: fake unemployed, tax evaders, crooked bosses: they are stealing 80 billion from us! | M6 | Zone Interdite

As France’s public deficit rises to €90 billion this year, benefit fraud and tax evasion is costing the state almost as much: €80 billion! The fraudsters have very different profiles: individuals who hide their money abroad, crooked bosses who set up scams to escape taxes, unemployed who abuse the benefits system. How is the State managing to combat these cheats? And, most importantly, to retrieve the colossal sums that are slipping away from it? With the end of bank secrecy in Switzerland, the French people who had hidden their money there now find their assets frozen. As a result some of them are now trying to bring their cash back home and are in the sights of the customs services. For months investigators have been tracking the fraudsters, and it’s paying off! Their dragnet operations sometimes mean they get their hands on hundreds of thousands of euros in cash and the guilty parties are left with empty pockets! Although Switzerland may not be so welcoming for secret accounts, we have discovered new networks for tax evasion. Some, amazingly, are very well established right next to the Ministry of Justice and, the height of irony, even buy advertising slots on television. There is another bonus that escapes the State: taxes that should be paid by businesses. Not declaring your employees is a classic, but certain unscrupulous bosses set up far more sophisticated scams. We reveal the methods by which they swindled the State and wrongfully received considerable sums. At the Employment Office, it’s the fake unemployed who are deepening the deficit: they live easy lives at the expense of the taxpayer. We discovered that, by making false declarations, some of them live very comfortably abroad by receiving benefits to which they are no longer entitled. We exposed some fantastic abuses: in particular a Bulgarian Minister who has no moral problem in receiving unemployment benefits paid by the Employment Office.