Public aid to businesses costs the State 211 billion euros, according to a Senate inquiry report.

This is food for thought for François Bayrou and his government, a week before their announcements concerning the 40 billion euros in savings they intend to impose on public spending. The first public budget has nothing to do with national education, nor with defense, and even less with debt servicing. What costs the state the most is the public aid paid to businesses .

After six months of work and hearings , some of which were headline-grabbing hearings with major bosses , the Senate inquiry committee on "the use of public aid to large companies and their subcontractors" has managed to total the annual amount of subsidies, support, contribution exemptions and tax breaks paid to large companies. No less than 211 billion euros were allocated to them in 2023.

• 88 billion euros in tax expenditure
• 75 billion in social security contribution exemptions
• 41 billion in financial interventions from BPI France, the “entrepreneurs’ bank”
• 7 billion in subsidies to businesses (excluding compensation for public service charges)

"This estimate of 211 billion euros for the annual cost of public aid "in the broad sense" must be seen as a minimum, since in order to construct this estimate certain aids were not included, due to a lack of robust and easily accessible data, in the scope studied" , underlines the rapporteur of the commission, the communist senator Fabien Gay, also director of L'Humanité .

Direct aid paid by the Regions (2 billion euros per year), aid from municipalities or communities of municipalities "whose amount is not easy to establish according to the Court of Auditors" could be added to these calculations, as well as aid from the European Union under indirect management (including the CAP), "whose annual amount is between 9 and 10 billion euros according to the General Inspectorate of Finance and European aid under direct management, which is difficult to estimate according to the General Secretariat for European Affairs."

Because this is the other major lesson of this report. This aid to businesses is part of a maze of more than 2,200 schemes, implemented by the State from its own budgets and those of social security organizations, by local authorities and, to a lesser extent, by the European Union.

The vagueness is so complete that the report notes, in its conclusions, that " there is no cross-cutting legal definition of public aid to businesses, nor of its scope from an economic point of view." This leaves the INSEE, the major authority responsible for national statistics, completely blind to the subject. However, this proliferation of public money in favor of businesses can be shocking at a time of "the proliferation of social plans and generous dividend payments," notes the report, which lists 26 recommendations to rationalize this aid and remedy the lack of transparency on its payments as well as the lack of monitoring and evaluation by the administration.