Officials in childcare benefits scandal investigated for lying to Parliament committee

The independent government investigation service, Rijksrecherche, is investigating whether or not top officials at the Ministry of Finance and the Dutch tax service, Belastingdienst, committed perjury in front of the parliamentary committee tasked with examining the childcare benefits scandal, according to Nieuwsuur. The decision to launch the investigation was already made back in June 2021, around the same time that the news outlets Trouw and RTL Nieuws reported allegations that Belastingdienst director Jaap Uijlenbroek did not tell the full truth in front of the committee, and neither did Minister of Finance official Manon Leijten.

Although the Public Prosecution Service confirmed the existence of an investigation to Nieuwsuur, the target of their investigation was not revealed. Uijlenbroek and Leijten both said they either did not know about the perjury investigation, or were not involved in it. Leijten said she has not been questioned by authorities about the matter.

Central to the investigation is a highly critical memo written in 2017 that said the Belastingdienst’s method of discontinuing childcare benefits of people wrongly accused of being fraudsters was reprehensible and unlawful. The memo was written by Sandra Palmen, who was the senior attorney for the benefits department at the Belastingdienst. Uijlenbroek and Leiten both testified in 2020 saying they were unaware of the 2017 memorandum. Uijlenbroek said the memo never crossed his desk, while Leijten said she could not recall having read it.

Palmen’s critical memo calling for an end to the practice was produced well before the scandal came to light, and she insisted that a group of at least 300 parents be compensated for the distress they suffered. However, the office did not act on her advice, and continued to fight the parents who sought restitution. The committee investigating the case wanted to know over three years later why the Belastingdienst did not take action by acknowledging they were in the wrong and repairing the damage.

However, the report by RTL Nieuws and Trouw led to the discovery that the memo was discussed during crisis talks at the Ministry of Finance on 4 June 2019, and that both officials were present at the meeting. Around the time of the report from the news outlets, an attorney representing several falsely accused parents filed a report about the alleged perjury with the Public Prosecution Service in The Hague. A decision has not been made about whether or not anyone should be prosecuted for perjury.

The scandal saw thousands of parents wind up in dire financial situations after the Belastingdienst cut them off from their childcare subsidies, and ordered them to repay all the money they received in prior years in one lump sum, sometimes tens of thousands of euros. Dual-nationality was one of the criteria used to identify potential fraudsters, as was ethnic profiling. A parliamentary committee tasked with investigating the Belastingdienst’s abuses found that parents faced unprecedented injustice, and the third Cabinet of Prime Minister Mark Rutte collapsed.