The balance on the minimum vital income (IMV), one of the star benefits of the legislature, yesterday caused a train crash between the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations and the Independent Fiscal Responsibility Authority (Airef). . The auditing body presented a harsh opinion on the matter and demanded changes from the Executive in the model to speed up aid, and the department of José Luis Escrivá, who presided over the Fiscal Authority before joining the Spanish Government, he responded harshly to what he considers conclusions with “lack of foundation”.
The epicenter of the controversy is the data on beneficiary households. The figures of one body and the other vary substantially. The Fiscal Authority denounced that the Spanish Government only quantifies the additions to the system, but not the deletions. For this reason, Inclusio counts 627,957 recipient families on May 31, while Airef reduces them to 284,000, 35% of potential recipients, which were 800,000.
Inclusion explains to La Vanguardia that the minimum income is “a living benefit in which a household enters and exits depending on the situation of vulnerability”, and “in deployment”. That’s why they consider that “the best way to give the data is cumulatively, since it’s the best way to measure its scope”. They also note that the autonomous communities also present their minimum income balance sheets cumulatively. “Our data are consistent and comparable with those of benefits of the same type”, they argue.
The president of the Airef, Cristina Herrero, went so far as to state in public yesterday that the Inclusion calculation “makes no sense” and compared it to the fact of continuing to calculate pensions when a pensioner dies. According to the ministry, on the other hand, the monthly payroll data provided by Airef “is less informative” and even “misleading”.
The origin of the discrepancy between the Spanish Government and the supervisory body goes back to May 25, the date on which the body presided over by Cristina Herrero sent to Inclusio the draft of the II opinion on the minimum vital income. The report was harsh. The Escrivá department reviewed it and requested a meeting with the authors to present their arguments. This meeting was held last week and, subsequently, Inclusio sent Airef a 93-page report with the aforementioned assessments, among others on “the absence of a deep analysis of the actions underway since of the ministry to reach the potential beneficiaries of the benefit or the 34 inclusion itineraries that have been launched in the last year”.
Airef’s opinion also concludes that six out of ten households (58%) that could collect the minimum income do not request it (non-take-up rate). There are 469,000 families. Of these families, 61% are households without minors. The majority is concentrated, in order, in Andalusia, Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Madrid.
