Could a new report on the Tax Authorities still be shocking? Yes, according to reactions from the House of Representatives to the two reports on fraud detection at the tax authorities that the Ministry of Finance published on Tuesday. Anyone on the blacklist of the Fraud Alert Facility (FSV) could end up in great uncertainty, even if there was no evidence that anything had gone wrong.
“Fearsome and unfair”, GroenLinks leader Jesse Klaver concluded that people could end up on this blacklist because of their nationality and appearance. “A low point,” tweeted SP MP Mahir Alkaya. Think leader Farid-Azarkan spoke of “a racist gang”. Pieter Omtzigt spoke of “serious constitutional problems”; the research by accountancy firm PwC also shows that sensitive data has been shared on a large scale.
The common denominator
The Fraud Alert Facility has been disabled for two years, but the damage done is only slowly becoming clear from the investigation reports. Nearly 115,000 people ended up on the blacklist – sometimes rightly and often not – because of their income tax returns, in addition to tens of thousands of benefit recipients and SMEs.
The common denominator: A spot on the list could be inaccurate, but still lead to major problems, and you almost never got rid of it. People could be excluded from the debt restructuring or placed under intensive supervision for years, even if an investigation did not provide evidence of fraud.
Actually, the new revelations are not about the Allowance Affair, the scandal in which the Tax and Customs Administration treated tens of thousands of parents who received childcare benefits as fraudsters. For example, if they were unknowingly customers at a dubious reception agency or if they had made a mistake in their paperwork, they had to pay enormous amounts of money. People also ran into problems through the health care and housing allowance and the child budget.
This time it concerns people who ended up on the register via a completely different route – their income tax. That’s what makes it so explosive. In recent years, the problems have often been partly blamed on the allowance system itself. That’s a complicated web of estimates of someone’s income, later settlements and refunds, supplemented with rules for fraud detection.
Moreover, paying out money is a task that the Tax and Customs Administration has not traditionally had in its duties: the allowance system has only been in existence since 2005. Collecting money is what the Tax and Customs Administration was set up for. That things have gone wrong there too, in the heart of the service, is a blow. It raises the question whether even a major step such as curtailing or even abolishing all surcharges, as announced in the coalition agreement, is enough to solve the problems.
Read alsoTax authorities estimated fraud risks based on nationality and appearance
And that for a government service that is already having trouble making adjustments. The scrapping of the jubelton and the reduction of VAT on fruit and vegetables, other plans from the coalition agreement, will take much longer than expected. The wealth tax from box 3 has even come to a complete standstill, after the tax authorities taxed savers incorrectly for years and was reprimanded by the Supreme Court for this.
Little is clear about taking into account ‘nationality’ and ‘appearance’ as risk factors. That would have been done manually: the PwC researchers found scans of passports in the register and entries in emails. But the fact that the office encountered these examples ‘regularly’ indicates that this problem is not incidental either.
“That is contrary to the constitution,” said State Secretary Marnix van Rij (Tax Authorities, CDA) about these cases of discrimination after the report was published in Nieuwsuur. He wants to further investigate the exact facts and announced compensation for victims. Van Rij had “not thought about it for a second” that the report, delivered by PwC on December 22, was only sent out on Tuesday, shortly before the corona press conference.
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