Dordrecht man arrested for large-scale fraud with childcare allowances

FIOD, the Tax Authority’s investigative department, has arrested a 61-year-old man from Dordrecht on suspicion of running a large-scale fraud network. The man allegedly helped around 2,000 people apply for childcare allowances they were not entitled to, the Telegraaf reports.

A person involved in the investigation called the Dordrecht man the “spider in the web” of a “large-scale” fraud case. People paid the man to help them apply for childcare allowances using false registrations with municipalities, citizen registration numbers for people who do not live in the Netherlands, fake addresses, and children who are not attending daycare. The man used the DigiDs of almost 2,000 people. According to the FIOD, this is “abuse of allowances in an organized context.”

The investigative service received the first signals of abuse - multiple DigiDs logging in from certain IP addresses - from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) early this year. They also discovered step-by-step instructions for applying for allowances you’re not eligible for shared on social media.

This year is the first time the FIOD has been investigating fraud with allowances since the benefits scandal, in which the Tax Authority falsely accused thousands of parents of fraud with childcare allowances, leaving many financially destitute when demanding repayment of received benefits. Ethnically diverse people were overrepresented among the benefits scandal victims - a second nationality was one of the “indicators” in the Tax Authority’s fraud signaling service (FSV).

The Tax Authority had to stop using the FSV as a result of the benefits scandal, so it no longer has an automatic way of identifying potential fraud. Former State Secretary Aukje de Vries (Allowances) told parliament in April that the Benefits Service was working on a system to assess signals of fraud without discriminating, violating privacy, or violating the Archives Act. “It is good to be realistic about the fact that as long as the multi-year enforcement strategy has not yet been fully implemented, this will put a brake on part of the (intensive) supervision for the time being.”