The company would have invoiced the services of employees for contact tracing, while they performed other tasks. The fraud would reach more than one million euros, writes Het Laatste Nieuws on Wednesday. On Tuesday, investigators raided the Belgian headquarters of Mifratel in Ghent. It is a subsidiary of the Dutch company Yource, one of the call centers commissioned by the then Minister of Welfare, Wouter Beke (CD&V), to organize contact tracing.
In November last year, Het Laatste Nieuws reported that Yource had allegedly used several collaborators for other assignments. While they were supposed to call coronavirus patients and their contacts, they would have made calls for other customers. Officially, these working hours were billed to the Flemish government.
In March, the Flemish government commissioned an audit of the bills and services of call centers that participated in contact tracing. The auditors discovered 25 million euros in abnormal invoices for all the call centers. An explanation with supporting documents was obtained for the equivalent of 10 million euros, but no proof of actual performance was provided for the remaining 15 million.
