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by southerntofu 1635 days ago
> The joke is that it's gotten so progressive that no one gets better

I don't think that's the reason. Public health systems in Canada/France/Belgium have (had?) a very good reputation because they were in fact really good until the neoliberal turn on the 80s/90s. When you have health workers running the show with a fair budget, wait times are low and results are good, and everyone is happy. Now introduce some managerial feudalism (see David Greaber's talk at CCC last year) and micro-management/benchmarking and things start to degrade.

Add to this mix that big corporations don't pay their dues and the government keeps reducing budgets and pretending they don't know why there's no more money flowing in and suddenly you've got health crisis on a wide scale and most people you know working in hospitals are depressive, either quitting or on the verge of suicide due to contradicting objectives: they want to help people but they're not given the means to do so. Social dues fraud is dozens of billions of euros every year in France, it's well-known and well-flagged and no government wants to do something about it.

If you're working in IT, think about it this way: management is benchmarking how many functions you write per day and does not care about the state of things as a whole. You are incentivized not to produce tests (which would indicate failure from your team specifically) but rather to ship away at once. Are you gonna produce good code?

EDIT: I should make it clear when i talk about social dues fraud, i don't mean individuals gaming the system to gain funds they're not owed (which is < 1% of fraud), and i'm not talking about small companies not paying their dues (the State is really good at harassing those until money flows in), i'm talking about CAC40 corporations who make billions of profit every year. They are the ones responsible for the social security hole ("trou de la sécu") and that's public knowledge.

1 comments

Honest question: what social security hole are we talking about here? What kind of fraud? The gross majority of the social charges of a large company depend on employee wages. Having worked for a few CAC40 companies, knowing the makeup of their workforce, and looking at their public financial data, the numbers seem square.

On the other hand, every day I see small businesses with significant undeclared revenue and obvious money laundering schemes going on. France makes it very easy to anonymously report all sorts of crimes, from domestic violence and child neglect to terrorism, but only a selected few can report to TRACFIN.

Personally I can't wait for France to adopt a fiscal data module like the Belgian HoReCa black-box [0], and given the overreaching arms of the French fisc I'm surprised it hasn't already.

[0] http://www.salesdatacontroller.com/belgium-prices-are-10-hig...

About unpaid dues (fraude aux cotisations), the highest financial authority (Cour des Comptes) estimated between 6.8 and 25 billion euros fraud annually in 2014, depending on the evaluation method. [0] Then there's dues exemptions. A study estimated 57 billion euros were exempted in 2015, 57% of which was compensated by the State's budget. [1]

We could also mention tax evasion and other schemes, which affect the ability of the national budget to compensate frauds. Despite arguments about the exact number, most agree big corporations pay less taxes than the small on average [2]. It's interesting to note the evolution over time of subsidiaries of CAC40 companies in fiscal paradises. [3]

Overall, there's plenty of fraud and "legal" exemptions on all levels. Quite enough to close the social security deficit.

> Personally I can't wait for France to adopt a fiscal data module like the Belgian HoReCa black-box

I think that's happening. The law is clear that accounting software has to be certified since a few years (which has been a major hurdle for FLOSS projects). Personally, i'm not so much interested in such measures as most of the fraud is committed by the very wealthy and such measures could affect smaller businesses and common people in some ways: need to invest in more expensive accounting equipment/software, more difficulty for undocumented people to find honest jobs (though they'll still be able to work for big industrial groups who are famous for exploiting them).

[0] https://www.ccomptes.fr/system/files/2019-11/20191202-synthe...

[1] https://www.cairn.info/revue-de-l-ires-2015-4-page-3.htm

[2] https://www.liberation.fr/politiques/2017/02/24/les-entrepri...

[3] https://www.capital.fr/entreprises-marches/les-entreprises-d...