Elly Seymor.Image Linelle Deunk
The Christmas lights are burning beautifully in the thrift store on Rotterdam’s Ambachtsplein. But the store’s founder, Elly Seymor (61), is shivering at home with the flu on Wednesday. She has never been sick as often as last year, says Seymor.
She has been struggling with her health since she had problems with the Rotterdam Work and Income department. He accused her of welfare fraud, stopped her benefits and ordered her to repay 60,000 euros.
Unjustified, it is now clear. On November 9, Rotterdam received a severe slap on the fingers from the administrative judge, who ruled that the municipality had violated the principle of legal certainty. Seymor, who set up a food bank and thrift store in 2018 and organized neighborhood activities, has always been open to the municipality about her volunteer work and has not committed fraud.
After this rebuke, Rotterdam put on the sackcloth. This month, the municipality reached a settlement with Seymor. She is not allowed to say more about it than that she has a ‘good feeling’ about it.
Acting carelessly
The Work and Income Department wants to learn from what happened to Seymor. Following her case, the service has adjusted its control over benefits. “We must ensure that even in exceptional cases, Rotterdam residents do not run into problems due to careless actions by the municipality,” the city council wrote to the council last week.
The food bank case, as the issue has come to be called, has had a lot of impact. “It usually goes well,” says director Annemarie de Rotte of the Work and Income Department. ‘This case was exceptional, the amount of money in her account was high. It shows us how wrong things can go.’
De Rotte says that it was only through the media attention to the case that she saw the full extent of it. At the end of September, Seymor told her story in the Volkskrant. She told how she ended up on social assistance due to chronic back problems, how she set up a food bank and a thrift store five years ago, and how she organized neighborhood activities for which she applied for subsidies. She discussed all her activities with the municipal service Prestatie010, which has to activate social assistance recipients.
Personal account
The mistake Seymor made was that she had the subsidies deposited into her personal bank account. This set off alarm bells at the municipality. In May last year, she asked her for an explanation for the deposits made over the previous three years, totaling around 42 thousand euros. Although the bank statements she provided showed what the money was intended for, the municipality stopped her payments. After months of insomnia, Seymor decided to go to court.
The statement that the municipality of Rotterdam was wrong fits in with a trend. The administrative judge has often questioned the government’s rigorous fraud policy.
This has everything to do with the benefits affair, in which parents who were wrongly accused of fraud by the tax authorities had little opportunity to defend themselves. After this, the administrative judges promised that they would look more closely at the ‘proportionality’ of the consequences for the citizens involved.
Human size
The Rotterdam Work and Income department also started working differently after the benefits affair, says De Rotte. ‘We rely more on the human dimension.’
The question is how things could go so wrong in this case. For example, after the accusatory letters from social services, Seymor was not given the opportunity to tell her side of the story in a personal conversation.
“When we invite social assistance recipients for a re-examination, there is a physical conversation, and also when we receive a signal of possible fraud about someone,” says De Rotte. ‘But after a report about a bank balance that was too high, we did not have that conversation as standard. We have now changed that.’
It was also striking that the official who sent Seymor the letters about repayments was not aware of her conversations about her volunteer work with an official from another municipal department. From now on, all information from different municipal services will be brought together if someone is accused of fraud, says De Rotte.
‘The information from different services is not together in one file, it is in different systems. This also has to do with privacy rules. Now in such cases the two colleagues have to call each other so that we do not miss any information.’
Extremely suspicious
Although Rotterdam labels Seymor’s case as an exception, a recent podcast by Open Rotterdam and Vers Beton paints a different picture. In it, several Rotterdam social assistance recipients describe the attitude of the Work and Income Department as particularly suspicious. They also had to justify deposits of a few euros, which made them anxious.
“Welfare recipients should not have to be afraid of us,” says De Rotte. ‘We also take a positive view and, for example, tell people who we see do not receive housing benefit that they are entitled to it. But we also need to investigate signals. There are welfare recipients who consciously commit fraud. We recently discovered that a woman had the income from her nail and hair salon deposited into an account for her children. Then we are really being fooled.’
‘Sad and not the intention’
De Rotte says she is looking forward to new legislation that is more flexible for social assistance recipients who unintentionally make a mistake. Because how things turned out with Seymor was ‘sad and certainly not the intention’, and she told her that personally.
Seymor appreciated that personal conversation. But the most important thing for her is that her name has been cleared. ‘Some people looked at me with a askance. They think: where there is smoke, there is fire. I really hope that the Work and Income department has learned from this. So that people don’t get into trouble like this again.’
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2023-12-26 04:00:37
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