Barcelona claims it could not have known that the employee who diverted social benefits had already done so in Montmeló.

BarcelonaTwo weeks after the case broke out, the Barcelona government has made its first public appearance to give explanations about the worker who should diverted money social assistance for seven years. The person in charge was the Fifth Deputy Mayor for Social Rights, Raquel Gil, who warned from the outset that she would not be able to provide much information to the groups because the case was already under judicial review after the City Council itself brought it to the attention of the Public Prosecutor's Office. She did, however, maintain that the fraud did not result in any social services users being left without assistance and that Barcelona City Council acted correctly when it hired this person in 2018, despite the fact that she had already been involved in an identical case at the Montmeló City Council.

"How could this person return to work in the public system without any kind of warning?" the opposition groups asked during Gil's appearance. The deputy explained that when she was hired, the worker—now removed from her duties—met "the requirements" and had made the essential "sworn statements." "We live in a state of law where the presumption of innocence exists," Gil stressed, who argued that without a "final ruling" in the Montmeló case, no alarm bells could ring at Barcelona City Hall: "It's not a matter of a lack of communication; if anything, we should talk about whether the judicial mechanisms are agile or not."

How it progressed The NewspaperThe employee at the Municipal Institute of Social Services (IMSS) who allegedly diverted nearly €400,000 in social assistance to her own bank accounts over seven years had already been reported in 2015 for doing the same thing at the Montmeló City Council. There, she was caught having already diverted €60,000. That case remains open and without a final sentence, something that, according to Gil, explains why no alarm bells went off when Barcelona hired her and, also, why it wasn't until this year that a colleague recognized her and the possible fraud was detected.

The fact that it was a coincidence—a colleague of hers in Montmeló met her again at an office in Barcelona—and not some internal mechanism that set off the alarm bells has been another point the groups have emphasized. This was pointed out by Junts and ERC councilors Neus Munté and Eva Baró, who emphasized that having official mechanisms to detect these cases is not the same as having a fortuitous detection, because in the latter case "it gives the impression that there could be other situations that have not been detected."

However, Gil, Junts, Barcelona en Comú, and ERC have emphasized the importance of not stigmatizing the City Council's social workers as a whole, who "the vast majority of them do very good work." "We cannot allow this to call into question the City Council's aid system," warned the deputy mayor, who insisted that this was an "isolated case" and assured that "it will not happen again."

"No one has been left without aid"

From Comuns, Councilor Carolina Recio has demanded that the City Council "go as far as it needs to go" and appear as a private prosecutor if a trial ends up being opened, and that it study whether it is necessary to compensate affected social service users "who may have stopped receiving the benefits to which they were entitled." Gil responded that "no one has been left without benefits," because "the damage has been done to the City Council's general budget, but not to the benefits."

The IMSS worker being sued used the data of social service users to which she had access to process emergency benefits for them without their knowledge. In this way, she pretended to process emergency benefits for them to pay for, for example, a room, but these funds ended up in parallel accounts belonging to the worker without the social service users ever even knowing that benefits had been requested in their name.

Despite defending the City Council's actions, Gil acknowledged that the case highlighted "the need to constantly update oversight mechanisms." In this regard, he noted that the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) has been working on a new aid model and new regulations since last year "with the aim of improving oversight."