Some 20,000 parents wrongly compensated as victims of benefits scandal, sources say

The Ministry of Finance paid compensation to at least 20,000 parents who were not really victims of the Childcare Benefits Scandal, NRC reports based on conversations with seven closely involved sources and internal emails and memos. They received €30,000 or more in compensation without good reason and despite warnings from officials.

In 2018, it became known that the Dutch Tax Authority had wrongly labeled thousands of parents as fraudsters for years, revoking their childcare benefits. They subsequently faced high and ruthless clawbacks, resulting in serious financial trouble, divorces, and children being removed from their parents’ custody. In 2020, the Cabinet decided to compensate the victims. Initially, the government expected several thousand victims. Ultimately, 44,000 people received compensation.

According to the newspaper’s sources, at least 20,000 parents from this group weren’t victims at all, and senior officials and responsible politicians repeatedly ignored internal warnings about this.

It involves parents who were classified as victims because the Tax Authority stopped their allowances without sending them a “stop letter.” This meant that they had no opportunity to prove that they were not committing fraud, which the government decided constituted bias on the Tax Authority’s part.

From the very beginning of the recovery operation, officials warned that many of these parents did receive “stop letters” and previous communications about their benefits being cut, giving them a chance to respond. Earlier this year, an investigation by the Government Audit Service confirmed the existence of these correspondence records, concluding that there was no doubt about their accuracy.

State Secretaries responsible for the recovery operation in recent years knew that the letter administration existed, but blocked its use by the officials responsible for the recovery operation. Without examining the administration, it was assumed that it was incomplete, irrelevant, or that its use did not “fit the background of the recovery operation,” the newspaper’s sources said, referring to the fact that the government had treated parents poorly and would not do so again in the recovery operation.

According to the sources, the responsible politicians and senior officials were so afraid of the government getting accused of again treating citizens unfairly that they refused to admit that almost half of the compensation paid out went to parents not entitled to it.

In a response to NRC, the Ministry did not explicitly deny the newspaper’s findings, stating that “without reassessing all individual files,” it was impossible to draw a “well-founded conclusion” regarding how many parents were wrongly compensated.

The Ministry said that at the start of the recovery operation, the “widely shared assumption” arose that the letter records were incomplete. The government therefore decided to prioritize the parents' narrative and believe them if they said they did not receive a letter.