The Minister of Public Works, Ana Pastor, has declared that her Ministry obtained savings of three million euros per month in the last quarter, after requiring users to present a certificate of residence. And her ...
The Minister of Public Works, Ana Pastor, has declared that her Ministry obtained savings of three million euros per month in the last quarter, after requiring users to present a certificate of residence. And her statements coincide with a recent operation by the Civil Guard that has allowed more than four thousand allegedly fraudulent travelers to be charged.
This coincidence of savings of public funds and detection of fraudsters could lead us to qualify the request for the certificate at the time of boarding as a reasonable imposition.
However, we must not forget that the Civil Guard operation starts from the investigation of a few travel agencies and has been based on the ex post verification of internal documentation, and not the checking of certificates when checking in.
From what has transpired, it seems to be a small group of agencies that offered extremely cheap tickets, something they achieved by managing a discount to which the user was not entitled.
It is reminiscent of other previously detected cases, in which the great fraud in the transport bonus for residents in the islands did not come from travelers, but from companies that invoiced the State for the 50 percent supposedly discounted to the user, based on fictitious prices that had nothing to do with the real ones.
Ana Pastor knows it and José Manuel Soria knows it. And they know that it would be much easier and more effective to establish a control system based on the exchange of data between airlines and the Population Register databases; something that is not technologically difficult but does require the political decision to implement it.
But no. It has been easier for Pastor and Soria, for Soria and Pastor, to describe the situation as a product of user abuse (have we flown beyond our means?), than as a business fraud. It has been easier to make the weakest part, the traveler, the object of control, than to put airlines, travel agencies and the Ministry of Public Works to work at levels of required modernity.
On the other hand, the minister falsifies reality because she ignores that part of that savings does not come from the control of fraud but from the surcharge that thousands of users have had to pay when they have forgotten the certificate at home or have had to travel urgently and unexpectedly, without that document at hand.
We all remember the recent case of a minor who was denied the return transfer to the Canary Islands from Madrid for having lost his residence certificate. Not even the photocopy sent by the Civil Guard from his city of origin was enough to board the child. The audit of the resident takes on tints of the most delirious universe of Aldous Huxley.
At the time, the implementation of this measure was harshly criticized by society, local administrations and a good part of the political class. A year later, with plenty of time to have developed the telematic systems that would avoid the collapse in the City Councils, the wasted time of travelers and the feeling of living a perpetual Big Brother, nothing has been done in that sense.
The answer is the usual one in our current Government of Spain: If you want to fly (study, be healed, train professionally, enjoy culture?) pay.
María Dolores Corujo
General Secretary of the Socialists of Lanzarote
