“Significant deficits”
Federal Audit Office: Devastating verdict on Heil’s “job turbo”
The Federal Audit Office has evaluated the Federal Labor Minister’s attempt to get Ukrainian refugees into work more quickly. The result is after star-Information devastating.
Hubert Heil (SPD) was confident when he presented the “Job Turbo” a year ago. This project will bring Ukrainian refugees “from the school desk of integration courses to the workplace more quickly,” promised the Federal Labor Minister during an appearance in Berlin in mid-October. And just a few days ago, his ministry wrote on its own website: “The job turbo is working.”
The judgment of the Federal Audit Office is significantly different. This emerges from a report that the federal authority submitted to the budget committee on Tuesday and which is the star is present. In it, the “care of refugees from Ukraine by the job centers” is examined in more detail. The results read devastatingly.
Around 540 million euros per month
Around 1.2 million refugees from Ukraine have currently found protection in Germany. Around 720,000 of them receive citizen’s benefit, of which around 500,000 are (theoretically) able to work. The benefits for them are 539 million euros per month.
In fact, Germany only has a very low employment rate of Ukrainian refugees in comparison: in June 2024 it was just under 30 percent. Other countries do much better: in Denmark, for example, the rate is around 70 percent.
Everything should get better with the “job turbo”: Through measures such as more consultations, early recognition of qualifications and faster placement in jobs, employment among refugees should be significantly increased.
The Federal Audit Office comes to the conclusion that this was not successful. The audit “revealed significant deficits in the job centers’ integration work,” the paper says.
“Job turbo”: lack of advice, poor placement
Specifically, various causes are listed:
- Too often there was a lack of advice during the integration courses. In 2024, no counseling took place in one in three cases, although integration courses were four times more likely to be canceled if the refugees were not counseled during them.
- The information provided by refugees was only checked inadequately or not at all, for example when they refused or dropped out of integration courses citing health reasons. “The job centers did not always have a medical certificate presented as proof,” says the audit report.
- The job centers often do not record CVs, knowledge and skills or do not record them completely. In 2024, the level of language skills of 18 percent of refugees was not documented, and in a further 24 percent of cases it was not even recorded at all. But this is a prerequisite for successful integration into the labor market. “The job centers must therefore significantly improve the collection of data about refugees,” warns the Federal Audit Office.
- The measure, which was actually intended as an “exceptional rule”, was used too often to prevent refugees from being placed in work. This may be justified if there are underage children living in the household and there is no childcare available. However, the job centers often failed to clarify whether the children were required to attend school or whether a parent or other relative could take care of them, according to the auditors.
- The job centers’ placement suggestions would have led to employment in less than one percent of the cases examined for 2024.
- There is no evidence that the “job turbo” has a positive effect: “The BMAS (Federal Ministry of Labor) has not yet been able to reliably prove whether it will lead to a stronger integration of refugees into the labor market.” In this respect, Heil’s promised relief effect for the 2024 federal budget of around one billion euros as well as the forecast reductions in spending for the following years are questionable.
Ministry of Labor disagrees
The report also notes that the Ministry of Salvation comes to a different assessment. However, the auditors state that this assessment must be “questioned”. Here the Ministry of Health incorrectly attributed natural declines in benefit receipt, which occur in any historical analysis, to the “job turbo”. Only withdrawals from receiving benefits would be noted, but no check would be made as to whether these people would become unemployed again after a short period of time.
But the examiners didn’t want to be completely merciless. The placement work of the job centers has “somewhat improved,” they note. The “Job Turbo” is also an instrument that makes sense in principle and its expansion is “sensible and important”.
In order for it to work, the conclusion is that job centers across the country must be given uniform guidelines for implementation. The Federal Ministry of Labor is asked to set “concrete, measurable goals”: “The success of the job turbo must be measured against this.”
Source: Stern
I have been working in the news industry for over 6 years, first as a reporter and now as an editor. I have covered politics extensively, and my work has appeared in major newspapers and online news outlets around the world. In addition to my writing, I also contribute regularly to 24 Hours World.
