Around a year ago in Germany, the government signed up to provide 'quickie-tests' for Covid. Test centers opened up, and the deal was.....a private organization would run these (not the government), and the government would reimburse at a rate of 18 Euro per test.
Yeah, the actual cost of the test kit was around 4 to 5 Euro at the time, and since spring....it's down to about 3 Euro each.....so there was a profit of 15 Euro....more or less.
So I noticed this yesterday off ARD news (public TV, Channel One).
The German government now has around 94 separate investigations going on, with centers that turned in paperwork, but were conducting fake tests. The government also admits that the real number will go higher than 94...because of ongoing efforts.
Connected to crime gangs/clans? No. Maybe they thought this in the beginning, but as the days pass....it's obvious that it was a local thing and just regular people seeing an opportunity to make extra 'loot'.
How many man-hours will be wasted by the police and prosecutor folks? Oh, this will turn into hundreds of thousands of man-hours in the end, with some folks likely going off to prison for fraudulent behavior.
Was this all predictable? This is the biggest part of the story. There wasn't a lot of effort to manage this and it was thrown together in a hectic way.
You can imagine the guy running a test center, and realizing that he could add sixteen fake test subjects a day, and add 160 Euro per day to his profit margin.
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