Are tickets “not paid” in France, as Marine Le Pen asserts? – Franceinfo

Guest of Europe 1, Tuesday September 14, Marine Le Pen said this: “In reality, everything that is a ticket in our country, tickets are not paid. It is just like doing nothing.” Are tickets really not paid in France? No, said like that, it’s exaggerated, but Marine Le Pen is not entirely wrong: a majority of fines in France are not paid.

It’s almost one in two for criminal fines, that is to say the tickets given in a court. It’s even lower for traffic fines or post-parking passes. In 2017, the recovery rate is estimated at 28%, according to a parliamentary report recently published. Figures confirmed to franceinfo by the General Directorate of Taxes. The shortfall for the state is estimated at around one billion euros.

These low recovery rates can be explained in different ways. We will take, for example, fines for circulation: the authors of the parliamentary report describe the collection system as “fragmented” and “seized up” with an average of one agent to process 20,000 unpaid fines. And not to facilitate the task, the computer system used is also singled out. This system was deployed 25 years ago and it will not be modernized until the end of the year, if not next year.

For criminal fines, the finding is similar. The recovery system was designed in the 1970s and is no longer effective enough today. For example, in 2017, the criminal courts, the courts of appeal and the assize courts sent more than 500,000 criminal conviction statements to the Public Treasury, which had to manually re-enter the information. Consequence: it has already happened that convicted people come to pay their fine without the public treasury knowing of the contravention.