The Valencian Institute of Social Services (IVASS) has suffered two major thefts in the last 20 years, from which it has not yet been able to recover a single euro. One of them has a court decision, in which a former director was sentenced to five years in prison, as shown in the report of his accounts prepared by the Court of Auditors of the Generalitat for the year 2024. In total, the entity dependent on the Ministry of Social Security expects to recover 250,000 euros from the two thefts: an embezzlement and a fraud. Furthermore, during the year analyzed, IVASS also had to pay 330,921.27 euros in overdue costs which correspond to “ordinary personal expenses of users, such as hairdressing, pharmacy or podiatry”.
According to the report of the Court of Auditors, in 2024 “the balance of 144,794.31 euros remains in the accounts, following the misappropriation of public funds during the 2009 financial year, awaiting payment for the execution of the sentence, the entity having initiated the appropriate legal proceedings in criminal matters”. These funds were stolen by its former director, José María Vicent, former administrator of IVASS when it was called Valencian Institute of Assistance to the Disabled and Social Action (Ivadis). Vicent was sentenced to four years in prison and eight years of disqualification.
The convicted former director was hired at the time to manage the administration of IVADIS, whose resources came from the budgets of the Generalitat Valenciana. The man was responsible for ordering payments to suppliers. What he did, as the Supreme Court decision indicates, was to modify the computer file containing the companies’ data. He kept the recipient’s name, but changed the account into which the deposit was to be made. Thus, he inserted others in his name or that of a company he controlled. He also had a second method of carrying out the fraud. Instead of payments to suppliers, he said they were salary advances for some civil servants, even though they never requested the advance. In this case, he made deposits on behalf of his wife, who was unaware of the irregular practices in which her partner was immersed.
José María continued this illicit activity for two years, from November 2008 to December 2010. In total, he made six fraudulent transfers. The largest amount was a transfer of more than 66,000 euros.
The other scam from which IVASS did not recover a single euro occurred in 2020. In this case, it was identity theft fraud. As revealed by the Sindicatura de Comptes, transfers worth 106,413.98 euros were made “whose recovery is considered distant”, so the funds were also registered as doubtful debtors, pending a court decision.
IVASS detected the commission of a scam worth around 100,000 euros in the payment procedures of one of its supplier companies, whose identity the fraudsters had usurped by falsifying various documents, as explained by the Ministry of Social Security in a 2020 press release, in which it specified that the stolen amount corresponded only to the payment of one of the monthly payments of this company.
The scammers processed a written request to change the current account, posing as the supplier company, in which they attached a certificate from the new financial institution with its stamp to give authenticity to the current account, and another document with the stamp and signature of the company justifying the change. Despite their plausibility, both documents were false.
In this sense, it was indicated that the crimes that would have been committed would be diverse, since in addition to fraud, we would be talking about identity theft and falsification of documents. A complaint was filed in court for the crimes of fraud, falsification of public documents, embezzlement and identity theft, so that the necessary procedures can be initiated aimed at recovering the stolen money and repairing any damage that may have occurred, both to the public company and to its supplier. For the moment, as the receivership explains, the money has not been recovered.
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