Tax office whistleblower named new Cabinet member for welfare policy
NSC parliamentarian Sandra Palmen will be the new State Secretary for Allowances and Customs, sources close to the government confirmed to NOS and WNL. Palmen was the first whistleblower to warn about mistakes being made with the childcare allowance in 2017 but was ignored at the time.
Palmen previously worked as a judge and as a civil servant at the Ministry of Finance. It was in this latter position that she raised the alarm about mistakes with the childcare allowance in 2017, but was not heard at the time. It was only a year later when the issue started gaining attention and the true extent of the benefits scandal came to light.
In the benefits scandal, the Tax Authority wrongly labeled thousands of parents fraudsters and ordered them to repay the full amount of the childcare allowances they had received, leaving many in financial ruin. Over 2,000 children were removed from their parents' custody as a result. Ethnically diverse parents were very overrepresented among the victims and the Ministry of Finance later had to acknowledge that institutional racism was at play - dual-nationality was one of the indicators the Ministry used to identify fraud.
Earlier this year, the government reported that over 68,000 people had come forward as victims of the benefits scandal and nearly 38,000 had been officially recognized as such and eligible for compensation. The assessment process was still ongoing for many victims. The recovery operation is expected to cost around 11.7 billion euros. A damning report on this scandal led to the entire Rutte III Cabinet resigning in early 2021.
Palmen succeeds Nora Achabar, who resigned in mid-November over the polarizing forms of interaction between politicians, she said. Her resignation happened in the aftermath of riots in Amsterdam around an Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv match, when Cabinet members were calling the violence an “integration problem” and coalition leaders were outright blaming “Muslims,” “Moroccans,” and “North Africans.”
