The minimum vital income (IMV) is a benefit that we launched three years ago to improve the living conditions of the most vulnerable households.
It is an innovative and dynamic service that internalizes the specificities of each home to meet its needs in a differentiated way. This makes its deployment complex, but it makes it more fiscally responsible and, above all, fairer.
This complexity made us want to evaluate it from the beginning, analyzing how we have been reaching the beneficiaries, and dialoguing with groups close to the applicants, with other administrations, with the third sector, putting solutions to solve the problems that they were identifying themselves. We have put in place, among other measures, mechanisms to be able to recognize as beneficiaries receivers of autonomous income; we have created the register of mediators so that the third sector could certify situations of vulnerability, and we have incorporated a supplement to help children to combat child poverty.
And we have also made enormous efforts to try to understand why part of the more than 800,000 families that we had identified as potential beneficiaries of the IMV based on their tax data had not applied for it. We made an effort to find out who they were, contacted them by SMS when we could, and even started an information bus that traveled the country drawing attention to this situation.
From the beginning we wanted to involve in the evaluation the institution that we believed could best contribute to its improvement through its analyses, the Independent Fiscal Responsibility Authority (Airef).
With this expectation, we have been surprised by how Airef has dealt with the evaluation of the IMV. First, because its conclusions imply a different conception of the provision than it was prefigured at its origin. Airef’s recommendation that the benefit be granted ex officio only on the basis of tax data would not only lead to a huge management problem because refund requests would increase exponentially – an issue that the report also criticizes – but would also create an unjustified extension of the benefit to groups for which it is not intended.
In practice, it is recommended to give the benefit ex officio to 800,000 families, which we could only do without checking compliance with the access requirements, granting the benefit to people who do not want to interact with the Administration because their tax data may not be complete or correct. Reorienting the IMV in the direction proposed by Airef would be neither fair nor fiscally responsible, and would compromise the social acceptability of this policy of support for the vulnerable.
Moreover, the obsession with reaching a number of beneficiaries leads to interpret as a negative thing that there are families that leave the benefit, when many of these exits are the result of the beneficiaries’ employment, which is undoubtedly a success of the policy.
These problems could have been corrected if the Airef had not limited itself to a static comparison of the numbers that were given before the policy was launched, but a more complete and open one, with dialogue with the different bodies involved in the management of the provision, and with an evaluation of the different measures adopted to reduce the access problem. This numerical reductionist approach could even be counterproductive because it would induce future decision-makers not to provide metrics when designing policies, fearing that these numbers will be used narrowly against them in the future.
The IMV is the best tool we have to fight poverty. It is a benefit that has reached 650,000 families, and whose deployment is helping to correct inequality. It is a robust policy that we will certainly continue to improve with constructive input.
