What is the benefits scandal?
For years – from 2004 to 2019 – the Tax and Customs Administration wrongly identified tens of thousands of Dutch families with childcare allowance as fraudsters. The first signals that something was going wrong in the fight against fraud were already heard in 2012, but it took until 2017 before it was on the political agenda. After years of political and official scheming, the entire Rutte III cabinet resigned in 2021 over the affair.
Somewhere between 30,000 and 70,000 families were affected by this Benefits Scandal. The Tax and Customs Administration sometimes claimed back hundreds of thousands of dollars in allegedly wrongly received childcare benefits and fines. The consequences were dramatic. People lost their homes and businesses, more than 1,100 children were removed from their homes and citizens who saw no way out got into psychological distress and sometimes ended their lives.
Why the Tax and Customs Administration labelled people as fraudsters and initiated a recovery is still unclear to this day. The State Secretary admitted that there was ‘broad’ ‘ethical profiling’, but how broad that was (or is) and what it was about is still shrouded in mystery.
