NRW demands Corona aids back: citizens feel cheated!

NRW demands Corona aids back: citizens feel cheated!

In North Rhine-Westphalia, 75,000 people threaten a shocking repayment of Corona-Forthilfe, which they received during pandemic. Many feel cheated because they believe that the original conditions have been subsequently changed. A person concerned expresses: "At the beginning it was not clear that something had to be repaid from the money." This uncertainty ensures massive uncertainty among the recipients.

The dispute over the repayments have been concerned with the courts for years and culminated in a judgment of the Higher Administrative Court (OVG) Münster in early 2023. This decided that the first reclaims for solo residents in North Rhine -Westphalia were illegal. The court found that the country did not adhere to the original requirements that were applied to the granting of the immediate help. Nevertheless, the OVG has clarified that the country is entitled to recalculate overpaid amounts if the recipients have not used the money to alleviate their economic emergency.

repayment claims and new procedures

An example is the freelance teacher Gustav Schneider, who applied for and received 9,000 euros in immediate aid during the pandemic. Schneider, who speaks of a "scandal", is frustrated because he has never been informed that he had to prove a liquidity bottleneck. The country's new feedback conditions now mean that it should pay back the entire sum.

The NRW Ministry of Economics defends itself against the allegations and relies on the judgment of the OVG, which made a new back registration procedure necessary. This procedure offers the recipients three options for calculating the liquidity bottleneck. The state of North Rhine -Westphalia justifies the recovery with responsibility towards taxpayers and European aid law. The so -called "IG NRW Soforthilfe" has already announced that the new procedure has been checked, which indicates that the argument about the repayments is far from over.