Live: Asscher ‘filled with shame’ about missing signals in supplements | Inland

Reporter Leon Brandsema is present at interrogations. You can read his tweets at the bottom of this article.

Asscher tells this in his interrogations about the benefits affair. He, like former secretaries of state Eric Wiebes and Frans Weekers earlier on Monday, had to answer for their role in the affair in which tens of thousands of parents were trapped by a fraud hunt by his own government.

In the previous cabinet, Asscher was responsible as Minister of Social Affairs for the policy and legislation regarding childcare (allowance). This included the law that ensured that the tax authorities reclaimed large amounts from parents who had made minor mistakes when applying for the childcare allowance.

The first week of the large-scale investigation into the benefits affair saw a number of shocking revelations. In the podcast Matter of Cents Herman Stam and parliamentary reporter Leon Brandsema discuss what has come to light so far:

“I did not realize that there was such a mountain of injustice and suffering,” says Asscher about that hard recovery that has affected thousands of parents. The interrogation committee refers to a letter that a concerned grandmother sent to Asscher about the problem. The PvdA responded by stating that he cannot discuss individual cases. He sent a similar response to someone who pointed out to him that there were more cases.

“When I read it back, it fills me with shame,” says Asscher about that first ‘cold’ letter. “I cannot intervene in an individual case, I am. But when I read that letter now, I find it very painful. Especially to this grandmother, who writes concerned about how her son and daughter-in-law are doing. ”

Different retrospect

The two former State Secretaries of Finance Weekers and Wiebes (now Minister of Economic Affairs) look back on the benefits affair in different ways in their interrogations. Weekers points to Asscher, who did not want to do anything about the hard reclaiming of the childcare allowance. But his successor Wiebes never experienced that problem as very serious.

Weekers indicated in his interrogation that he had raised the problem with Asscher. He had to change the law at his ministry to be able to do something about this. Weekers gave a memo about the problem to Asscher with the message to pay personal attention to it. But a few months later he received a negative response from Asscher’s ministry about changing the law. Weekers: “I accepted that.”

Incidentally, Asscher says in his interrogation that the memo only contained solutions that were difficult to implement, requiring action to be taken in donations within families or no childcare allowance would be paid for childcare within the family sphere.

Remarkably, Wiebes gave a completely different picture. He said he had not noticed much of the ‘stomach ache’ that top tax authorities said they had last week around the hard chargeback. “I thought from the beginning that there was a big problem with childcare allowance, but not with disproportionate reclaim,” said Wiebes. He recalled a note from his officials in which he himself scribbled that problem in the margins. But according to him that was ‘not a stomach ache note’. “It seemed to me rather to warn me against the opposite: we were too soft.”

According to him, the problem was that the childcare allowance was ‘in practice an impracticable piece of legislation’ for parents when applying for the allowance. “A kind of exam that you have to take where you only get a pass if you answer all questions correctly,” Wiebes called it.

‘Make-do’

Weekers also told in his interrogation about what he found at the Tax and Customs Administration when he took office as State Secretary of Finance in 2010. That was not good. The benefits department was ‘miserable’, says Weekers. He points out, just like several officials in their interrogations last week, that the tax authorities could hardly cope with the payment of supplements.

According to Weekers, the Tax and Customs Administration was mainly ‘a collecting organization’: “That was in the DNA.” The benefits were then added through the introduction of the benefits system, a few years before Weekers took office. The systems could hardly cope with that, according to the VVD’er everything was ‘stick and string’ together.

According to political commentator Wouter de Winther, the political interrogations can be dangerous for ministers, also because it is election time. “That’s why they are pre-trained,” he says in the political podcast Afhameren:

Wiebes, who took office four years after Weekers, also saw all kinds of problems with the tax authorities at the start. He painted the picture of “a service that had been overwhelmed by all kinds of legislation, was slowly recovering and catching up. And the whole uproar about fraud had come on top of that. ”

More political hearings will follow later in the week. On Wednesday, it will be the turn of the current Minister for Medical Care Tamara van Ark, until this summer as State Secretary of Social Affairs responsible for childcare. And also Menno Snel, who stepped down as State Secretary of Finance at the end of last year because of the benefits affair. The interrogations of Minister Wopke Hoekstra (Finance) and Prime Minister Mark Rutte will follow on Thursday.

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