This system has been progressively applied since 2004 and has enabled many unlawful cases of concurrently claiming unemployment benefits and receiving salaried, self-employed or disability income or pensions or pensions to be detected. More than 22,000 unlawful cases were accordingly detected in 2008 amounting to EUR 25 million (for information purposes, 404,000 persons were registered as unemployed in Belgium in 2008).
Since 2009, automatic database crossing is carried out before the payment of unemployment benefits, which enables unowed payments at source to be avoided and ensures even better results.
This system has considerably reduced unemployment benefit fraud and has resulted in significant savings in the social security budget, which contributes to the viability of this system.