A minister who is incorrectly or incompletely informed by his officials has little chance of completing his term of office in one piece. After all, the minister or state secretary will then – without realizing this – provide incorrect information to the House of Representatives and also make the wrong decisions.
Anyone who wishes Hans Vijlbrief a long and fruitful political career must hope that the State Secretary of Finance, responsible for tax matters, among other things, listened carefully to his three predecessors this week. From the statements made by Frans Weekers, Eric Wiebes and Menno Snel before the parliamentary interrogation committee on Childcare Allowance, a loud and clear advice to Vijlbrief can be distilled: never blindly trust the top civil servants of your own tax authorities. Weekers and Snel had to resign because they had not yet learned that lesson. Wiebes spent his entire term in office in the dark about what was really going on in ‘the palace of great numbers’, concluded committee chairman Chris van Dam.
Didn’t get through
For example, Weekers assumes that ‘the Tax and Customs Administration will comply with the law’, while the service does not always do so when stopping and reclaiming childcare benefits. The VVD member is ‘put on the wrong foot’ by his officials at the end of 2013. At the time, there was a fuss in the House of Representatives because about one hundred thousand people entitled to benefits did not receive their allowance on time. Weekers: ‘At first I was informed that those people themselves were guilty of this because they had not provided a bank account number. It later turned out that those citizens had tried that, but that their mutation had not made it through the automation system. ‘
Looking back, he says: “What has caused a lot of trouble for me and my successors is that information at the Tax Authorities gets stuck in one or another layer of clay.” Snel and Wiebes also believe their top officials are blue when they swear once again that the problems at the Tax and Customs Administration / Surcharges are really under control, or that hard work is being done to improve them. While Wiebes experiences exactly the same as his predecessor: “Weekers’ annoyance, that information from the Tax and Customs Administration always ends up in the media rather than the State Secretary, later also became my annoyance.”
The Tax and Customs Administration is struggling with a major cultural problem, the three analyzes afterwards. The service has a strong tendency to downplay real problems, withhold sensitive information and respond defensively to criticism. Director General Peter Veld is even able to inform the new State Secretary Wiebes that Wiebes is ‘only there to arrange the money’. He should not get involved in running the Tax and Customs Administration, Veld can do that very well himself. Wiebes, of course, does not agree, because if things go wrong at the service, it is his head that rolls through the House of Representatives. Yet none of the three secretaries of state has given up confidence in the leadership of the service; they continue to support it to the end.
Bad experience
The only one who does hit the table with a fist is Wopke Hoekstra, Wopke Hoekstra said during his own interrogation on Thursday. When the Minister of Finance is in direct charge of the allowance file, he too becomes deeply frustrated by the unwillingness or inability of the tax authorities to produce essential information. Shortly after taking office, he already had a bad experience. In December 2017, the service suddenly confessed that 400 million euros less tax was collected than stated in the national budget. “That’s a very big budget gap that they should have warned me about much earlier.”
Hoekstra has to fill in once for Menno Snel in May 2019 during Question Time in the House of Representatives. The minister has to answer the politically sensitive question whether the Tax and Customs Administration has done ethnic profiling. ‘In preparation, I go to a room with tax officials. There is disagreement among them about when the ICT system with the two nationalities was put into use and when the tax authorities stopped using it. So I get conflicting advice about what to tell the House. Afterwards I said to Secretary-General Leijten: “What I was told there is clearly insufficient to prepare a member of government for Question Time.”
Task of the Prime Minister
Menno Snel will resign just before the Christmas recess, after which Hoekstra will be temporarily responsible for the settlement of the benefits affair. In any case, the minister wants to ensure that the first three hundred parents who have been victimized receive the promised compensation before Christmas. But that is also ‘not easy’ according to Hoekstra. Address lists were incomplete and bank account numbers were missing. The information provided to the Tax and Customs Administration is simply not in order. ‘
Hoekstra does not fully understand why the three state secretaries underestimated this problem. ‘As a member of the Senate, but also as a citizen reading newspapers, it had long been clear to me that the Tax and Customs Administration is facing major problems.’ Hoekstra subscribes to Snel’s self-criticism that the dead state secretary has relied on the information of his officials for too long. Which also raises the question of where a State Secretary for tax affairs should get his information from if that is not possible from his own officials.
What does Mark Rutte, who is the last in the interrogation bench, really think of this? He calls Menno Snel an ‘excellent’ State Secretary who was wrongly forced to resign. As prime minister, he does not and does not consider it his task to deal with the substance of the allowance file. Although Snel was free to sigh in Rutte’s presence, he could count on nothing more than an encouraging pat on the back. Commissioner Tom van der Lee is flapping his ears. ‘You are the most influential politician of this era. You are prime minister and the most important man in government. Three secretaries of state get into trouble under your administration. Have you really never thought: ‘I should be more involved in this file?’ No, Rutte answers. “I didn’t think so.”
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