In 2015, the top civil servants of the Dutch tax administration added an item to their action list. Politicians, it said, should be brought into the “dilemma” of the group approach: 80 percent wrong, 20 percent right, and the impact on the 20 percent.
The item sat on the list for a long time. Then it disappeared, and the files don’t show what became of it. A parliamentary inquiry later found that the 80/20 split was an assumption. No figures backed it up.
The 20 percent were parents.
The Netherlands pays childcare benefit in advance and settles up later. When the benefits law was drafted in 2004, the Council of State advised adding a hardship clause for cases the rules didn’t foresee. The cabinet said no. Its reasoning, as the inquiry summed it up: with so many payments, the benefits office had to run like a machine, and exceptions were sand in the gears. Parliament agreed.
In spring 2013 the news broke that a Bulgarian gang had collected housing and healthcare allowances using false addresses. The state secretary and the tax chiefs addressed the benefits staff in person: enough was enough. The fix was more checking before money went out. A self-learning risk-classification model scored applications on a few dozen indicators, and the highest scores went to a civil servant for a manual check. According to Amnesty, citing the Dutch Data Protection Authority, that official was not told why the system had flagged the file. From at least March 2016 to October 2018, one indicator was “Dutch citizenship”: yes or no.
The extra checks came with a business case. The benefits office got €25 million for more checking capacity, and that sum had to be earned back every year by paying out less wrongly. Until 2019, the inquiry found, management steered on that sum.
What counted as wrong was strict. A missing signature or an unpaid parental contribution, and the office reclaimed the whole year’s benefit, money usually already spent on daycare. Families with the lowest incomes generally got the largest benefits, so they faced the largest bills. If the office decided there had been intent or gross negligence, no personal payment plan was allowed. Internal notes from 2019 put the share of payment plan requests refused on those grounds at about two thirds, often with no second reviewer.
Warnings came. In August 2017 the National Ombudsman reported on 232 families whose benefits had been stopped as a group. Within a month, State Secretary Eric Wiebes told parliament that nothing had shown parents suffering unnecessary harm. He had not been told that months earlier, an internal memo had listed the office’s own mistakes and argued for compensation. Under oath in 2020, he called his answer idiotic. Also in 2017, the privacy regulator got two tips about nationality data. The benefits office said it held no data on second nationality. It did, and corrected itself in April 2019.
The inquiry’s report, “Ongekend onrecht” (unprecedented injustice), came out on December 17, 2020. As many as 26,000 parents, the Guardian reported, had been wrongly accused. On January 15, 2021, Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s cabinet resigned. “Mistakes were made at every level of the state,” he said.
In October 2021 Amnesty published a report on the model, titled “Xenophobic Machines.” In December the data protection authority announced a €2.75 million fine against the tax administration, set higher because its use of nationality had been discriminatory. By then the model had been switched off for more than a year.