Dutch gov't severely criticized in parliamentary hearings on benefits scandal

The Dutch government received fierce criticism during the parliamentary inquiry into the benefits scandal and its fraud policy this week. The National Ombudsman, the Dutch Data Protection Authority, and the Council of State all had no good word to say about the government’s fraud approach while speaking with the parliamentary committee of inquiry.

“The government sees the citizen as a fraudster,” National Ombudsman Reinier van Zutphen told the parliamentarians on Thursday. “The government applies the word fraud to anyone who makes a misstep. Even if you do not fully understand and make a mistake.”

Nobody cared about the consequences of their fines or sanctions against these alleged fraudsters. “They didn’t care what happened to the people,” he said, referring to everyone, top to bottom, who made a decision or implemented a sanction - from the Minister to the letter writer, he said. “They were not automated decisions. Someone purposefully made that decision.”

Since 2010, the National Ombudsman has published several reports warning about the government’s harsh fraud policy. Too little was done with these recommendations. “If the Cabinet and parliament had taken our reports seriously earlier, a lot of suffering would have been prevented,” Van Zupthen told the parliamentarians.

The government’s fraud policy “massively and completely” violated people’s fundamental rights, chairman Aleid Wolfsen of the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) said during his hearing before the parliamentary committee of inquiry. As far as he is concerned, this affair is rightly called the benefits scandal, but there is also a “fundamental rights crisis or fundamental rights scandal.”

The government and Tax Authority violated fundamental rights by unlawful use of data and discrimination. It also violated the right to defend yourself properly before a judge and the right to enjoy property, Wolfsen said. “If you see now rules were applied, they were always advantageous for the government and almost always disadvantageous for the citizen. If you put that together, we have a broader problem than extra charges or fines,” he said.

According to Wolfsen, the Tax Authority and other government services seem oblivious to the dangers surrounding personal data. “It’s about raising awareness to handle people’s information very carefully. There was just a blacklist going around filled with all kinds of gossip. And that in an atmosphere of: we share everything with everyone, and everyone can access everything,” he said. “When you see how things can go wrong with data and can go wrong with vulnerable people who are under surveillance en masse. With discriminatory things that have come to the surface.” He called it “terrible.”

The Council of State said that, for a long time, it was unaware that the collection of childcare allowance plunged the involved parents into financial ruin. The tax Authority always reported that a payment arrangement would be made. “But we were told a different story than actually happened,” Bart Jan van Ettekoven, chairman of the administrative jurisdiction division of the Council of State, told the parliamentary committee. According to Van Ettekoven, “it turned out later” that the Tax Authority did not follow the guidelines to consider people’s financial capacity and living allowance for basic needs. “We should have asked deeper questions” about this, he said.

Van Ettekeoven also said judges adhered so long to the Tax Authority’s harsh course due to a lack of clarity in the law. According to him, it had been “clear to everyone” since 2006 that the relevant laws, the Childcare Act and the General Income Dependent Act, were mandatory, and even minor irregularities were decisive for ruling against parents and ordering them to repay their allowances. It was only in 2019 that the Council of State overturned that harsh interpretation and ruled more leniently towards parents, partly because the courts in The Hague and Rotterdam had opposed the harsh course. A lesson learned from this is that courts and the Council of State must share information from now on, he said. He also called it “extremely regrettable and not good” that the Council did not address the concerns when the judges in Rotterdam first raised them in 2014.