Ex-Health Minister Spahn wanted to contain the pandemic with the hasty approval of thousands of corona test centers, but in doing so he was promoting a gigantic fraud industry. Criminals, clan criminals and Hartz IV recipients ripped off more than one billion euros in tax money. The state let her do it.
With his policy to combat the corona pandemic, the former Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn (CDU) not only made friends – on the contrary. All over the country, he received massive criticism for his sometimes clumsy actions as the nation’s most important crisis manager at the time. The bumpy start to vaccination, the chaotic procurement of masks, the inadequate Corona warning app – the minister gave reason to doubt his abilities in a number of areas.
The same applies to another project that Spahn fervently promoted and praised as the mainstay of fighting the pandemic: the free corona rapid tests for citizens. Encouraged by Spahn’s policy, private operators opened many thousands of test stations throughout Germany from summer 2020. They recovered the costs from the associations of statutory health insurance physicians – a total of more than 14 billion euros.
It became apparent early on that the state had issued an invitation to fraud with this model. Because anyone who wanted to set up a corona test center did not have to present real ID cards or certificates of good conduct. A few clicks on the internet were enough.
The fact that no medical staff was needed for the quick tests attracted crowds of people from outside the industry: operators of snack bars, late-night markets, slot machine casinos, shisha bars, clubs and fitness studios. Professional criminals with dozens of criminal records (in Berlin, a test center provider had more than 160 entries in its police file) and windy figures from the clan milieu felt addressed. On literally every corner, private individuals offered corona tests, and at times citizens could choose between more than 20,000 stations. Spahn had triggered a real gold rush mood.
No wonder, because the deal was worth it: until July 2021, the operators received 12 euros for each test, after that it was still 8.50 euros. With a few hundred tests a day, this quickly added up to a pretty sum. Carsten Schneider, until 2021 first parliamentary director of the SPD parliamentary group, spoke of a “license to print money” and meant that the bosses of the test stations earned stupid and stupid. Berlin’s chief public prosecutor, Thomas Gritscher, remarked smugly that if the state made it so easy for the perpetrators, “it doesn’t take a lot of criminal energy to obtain this money”.
The scammers also raked in so much tax money because the state had not installed any control mechanisms. He deliberately avoided the minimum bureaucratic requirements or checks that are otherwise common at every dingy sausage stand. The motto was “test, test, test” – despite urgent warnings from experts who had seen the disaster coming. But Jens Spahn and his followers brushed aside the warnings and thus contributed to the emergence of a flourishing fraud industry.
The first regulation from Spahn expressly did not provide for the operators of test centers to be checked. An internal paper from the Federal Ministry of Health, from which “Spiegel TV” recently quoted, says:
“The Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians was not obliged to check the underlying information during billing, as this would lead to considerable delays in billing and thus greatly reduce the willingness of potential service providers to participate in the test strategy.”
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The consequences of this political organizational failure can still be felt today. Hundreds of investigations are pending in judicial authorities across the country because fraudsters are said to have billed for a large number of tests that never took place. Or they submitted bills for test centers that never existed. Only the money that was transferred to them by the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians was genuine. The State Criminal Police Office (LKA) Berlin estimates the total damage nationwide at up to 1.2 billion euros. In some cases, the investigators were able to secure the stolen tax money, but often the loot had long since seeped away into dark channels, mostly abroad.
Numerous court proceedings have shown how easy it has been for corona test fraudsters for a long time. Sometimes even the judges were stunned by the state decision-makers’ attitude that I don’t care.
The Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians accepted documents for planned test centers that were reminiscent of sketches from kindergarten. Some hastily scribbled maps had just a single word (“Entrance”), while other papers submitted were riddled with spelling mistakes. People who had long since died were listed as alleged test subjects. And many addresses at which mass corona tests were allegedly carried out turned out to be fake addresses – but nobody noticed for a long time.
It was only over time that prosecutors found out about the scammers. The investigators struck somewhere in Germany almost every day. Financial investigations, raids, confiscations, arrests – the deeper police officers and prosecutors delved into the abysses of the Corona test world, the more crimes they uncovered. FOCUS Online provides an overview of the most spectacular cases:
The extent of the fraud should hardly have surprised the Minister responsible at the time, Jens Spahn. After all, experts had warned him about such a development. However, only after the first major grievances became known did the Federal Ministry of Health concede a “need for action” in an internal paper.
Spahn issued a new test regulation intended to make billing fraud more difficult. However, it only provided for a random review of evidence of individual tests – in one percent of the statements. This meant that 99 percent of all invoices submitted remained largely unchecked. Here only “plausibility” had to be considered, i.e. mathematical discrepancies. To this day, there is no standard check as to whether tests that have been billed for actually took place.
After all: In the current test regulation, which has been in force since June 30, 2022, the number of cases that are examined more closely as a sample has been increased to two percent. The remuneration for test centers has also been reduced. In addition, in the event of a specific suspicion, the associations of statutory health insurance physicians have more rights to obtain further information from the test stations, which was previously subject to data protection.
Meanwhile, experts doubt that the associations of statutory health insurance physicians in the 16 federal states are always highly motivated to unmask possible fraudsters. Because as paradoxical as it sounds, the associations themselves have a great interest in as many tests as possible being billed. After all, they receive a “reimbursement of administrative costs” of 3.5 percent for each billed case. The more money the test center operators charge, the more money gets stuck with the organization itself. One could speak of a conflict of interest. Critics claim that the associations of statutory health insurance physicians bear enormous complicity in the large-scale fraud with corona tests.
In Berlin, the public prosecutor’s office is even examining whether the Board of Directors of the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians can be prosecuted for breach of trust. There is a suspicion that those responsible did not pass obvious suspected cases on to the police. The union disagrees. In an information letter to the doctors, it is said that there was undoubtedly large-scale fraud in Berlin when it came to billing for citizen tests. However, the accusation of infidelity is strongly rejected. So everything as always: the damage is immense, but nobody wants it to have been, nobody is responsible.
And what does the main person responsible for the chaos, ex-Health Minister Jens Spahn, say about the mess? “Nothing!” A TV crew who recently asked him for a statement, he rebuffed slickly: “You have to go through it!”
