Admin blunder: Thousands maybe wrongly received benefits scandal compensation

An administrative blunder at the Tax Authority may have resulted in thousands of people getting financial compensation for the childcare allowance scandal that they were not entitled to, NRC reports from internal information from the Benefits Recovery Implementation Organization (UHT). According to the newspaper, the Ministry of Finance has been keeping this report under wraps for months.

It concerns parents who requested compensation from the UHT, saying that the Tax Authority never sent them a “reminder letter” before stopping their childcare allowance. The “reminder letter” follows a “request letter” for more information to check whether the person is entitled to their allowance. If parents fail to respond to both these letters, the Tax Authority can stop and eventually reclaim an allowance.

Many parents who claimed compensation from the UHT said they never received a reminder letter and, as a result, did not get the opportunity to correct incorrect data or supplement missing information. Because the UHT could not find whether reminder letters were sent and where in the Tax Authority’s systems, all these applicants were recognized as victims of the benefits scandal. That made them eligible for at least 30,000 euros in compensation and the forgiveness of any debts. Their children could also claim up to 10,000 euros in compensation per child.

But in October last year, an intenral UHT investigation came across files in the Tax Authority’s system showing who had been sent which letter and to which address. These files revealed that many of the parents who were recognized as victims received reminder letters, but failed to respond to them.

“We have been assessing a great many parents for a very long time without knowing about these files,” UHT director Anne Coenen said in a meeting in February, according to NRC. “That puts a slightly different light on what we have done so far.”

According to Coenen, parents who failed to respond to the Tax Authority’s repeated requests for more information were wrongly labeled as victims in the recovery operation. “If people received two letters to which they never responded, and then the allowance was stopped and they did not respond to that, and then the allowance was reclaimed, then you could say: there is nothing strange going on.”

UHT employees told NRC that in approximately 20 percent of the files they handled, missing proof of a sent reminder letter was the only reason the parent was recognized as a victim. That comes down to 8,000 of the 41,000 recognized victims.

A spokesperson for responsible State Secretary Sandra Palmen (Benefits, NSC) told NRC that the findings were shared with the political leadership in October, but “their reliability and usability” are still being investigated.

The Ministry of Finance told the newspaper that it could not give a “factual answer” on how many people may have wrongly received compensation because there is “no registration from which it can be determined how many parents have been identified as victims based solely on non-response.”