Faced with fraud, Caf beneficiaries are tracked and the organization quickly detects if it has made an undue payment.
Each year, around 3 billion euros are overspent by the Family Allowance Fund due to fraud and reporting errors. The CAF therefore constantly monitors beneficiaries, in particular using software that cross-checks numerous data on beneficiaries. Since 2010, a robot has reviewed a whole bunch of information and thus makes it possible to report suspicious situations to inspectors. A score, between 0 and 1, is assigned to each beneficiary. The closer the score is to 1, the higher the risk of fraud, as revealed by several surveys (published by The world, Radio France, Médiapart And Squaring the Net).
If this may raise questions about the use of personal data, the latter is supervised by the CNIL. Here are the elements of your file that the CAF can use to track you: age, social security number, nationality (French, European Union or outside the European Union), data relating to your accommodation, data relating to children, data relating to the professional activity and your resources, social benefits paid, exchanges, checks and reminders with the CAF.
Silent in the past on the subject, the CAF ended up disclosing the elements considered to be the main warning signals of possible fraud. According to the elements transmitted to World, the most important is the presence of a child aged 19 and over in the household. Furthermore, for the CAF, changing the amount of its rent more than five times in a year and a half is just as suspicious. Just like declaring the Disabled Adult Allowance (AAH) every three months when you receive it or when a widowed, divorced or separated person notifies the administration of a change in marital status.
But this data is constantly evolving. Former general director of Caf, Vincent Mazauric for example declared that thousands of checks took place in 2019 because many quarterly declarations had been made “from an IP address located outside France.” Updating your situation from a foreign country was therefore one of the elements that alerted you to possible fraud. Data that is no longer found in the current Caf table.
In 2017, it was revealed that CAF expressly requested to “target people born outside the European Union”. A revelation of Defender of rights that the organization’s management has never confirmed… nor denied. This element may have disappeared, just like the tracing of IP addresses, since the algorithms are “revisited often so that they remain effective.”
By taking certain elements into account, profiles of beneficiaries likely to commit fraud can therefore be established. This automation has become “the main source of detection of files intended for control.” But if the CAF relies heavily on automatic data processing to track down fraudsters, it assures: “a controller always intervenes after an algorithm because this represents the safest protection.”