Turin, Carabinieri discover 1 million NHS fraud to obtain medical treatment, 3 arrested

Turin, This morning the Carabinieri of the Provincial Command of Turin carried out 3 precautionary measures, following an order issued by the investigating judge of the Piedmontese capital at the request of the Crimes against the Public Administration Group of the local Public Prosecutor's Office. Aggravated fraud and abusive access to databases are the various crimes alleged against two Albanian citizens and the son of one of these, an Italian employee at the Revenue Agency, subjected respectively to house arrest, the obligation to sign and suspension from public office, as they were seriously suspected of having built a complex mechanism that allowed them to defraud the national health system, guaranteeing their compatriots free medical care without having the right to it.
The investigation, conducted between September 2019 and October 2020 by the soldiers of the Turin Investigative Unit, made it possible to document how the two women, operating as cultural mediators in the ISI - Immigrant Health Information centers - of Turin and its province, favored illicit manner of the Albanians allowing them to be treated at the expense of the Italian taxpayer.
The art. 35 of the "Consolidated text of the provisions concerning the regulation of immigration and rules on the condition of foreigners" allows non-EU citizens who are not in compliance with the rules on residence to still access health care, totally paid for by the public system in the event that find yourself in a state of poverty. The people included in this category are assigned an identification code called STP - Temporarily Present Foreigner - through which they can receive medical treatment in public healthcare facilities.
Taking advantage of this rule, during their work the two women invited the Albanian citizens they came into contact with to declare a date of entry into Italy dating back more than three months before (permitted stay time for tourism reasons), so as to be illegal in the territory national. To avoid tracing the real date of access to Italy through the visa stamped on the passport, they invited people to file a report of loss of the document. Subsequently, a false declaration of indigence was drawn up and at this point the STP code was granted. The third person reached by the measure instead illegally accessed the Revenue Agency's database for asset assessments on the beneficiaries of the benefits.
The activities carried out made it possible to identify 152 Albanians who exploited this system, all under investigation for fraud, the majority of whom arrived in Italy with the sole purpose of receiving treatment free of charge. In total, 175 incidents of fraud were confirmed for a total damage of over 1 million euros.