Three years ago, the top of the tax authorities and the Ministry of Finance ignored a memo by an official who warned of the “inadmissible course” surrounding the childcare allowance, according to a Tuesday. brief from State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen (Finance) to the Lower House.
It is estimated that the tax authorities have wrongly labeled nearly 30,000 people as fraudsters. These people had to pay back tens of thousands of euros in childcare allowance. Many of them got into serious financial trouble.
The memo shows that an official warned the top of the tax authorities in 2017 about abuses surrounding the discontinuation of benefits. The employee advised the management team to offer the injured parents “some form of compensation” and noted, among other things, that benefits have been discontinued on the basis of “incorrect legal grounds”.
Van Huffelen sent the memo to the Lower House on Tuesday at the insistence of CDA MP Pieter Omtzigt. She admits that this shows that “critical signals” were not heard, so attention was paid to the matter too late.
The memo would have been discussed by the management team at the time, but nothing else has happened with it, Van Huffelen confirms in the letter. Also, the memo was later not shared with the Donner Commission, which investigated the matter. Not even after it surfaced internally at the tax authorities in 2019.
Under pressure from MPs and media reports, more has become clear in the past two years about the major consequences of the derailed hunt for fraudsters at the Tax and Customs Administration. The cabinet is trying to settle the matter, but the payment of the compensation is very difficult. The delay leads to discouraged reactions in the House of Representatives.
This year, the cabinet expects to help three hundred to six hundred families affected. “At this rate it will take us a hundred years,” said MP Omtzigt, frustrated.
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