One of the recommendations is to stop pumping around so much money. If you let less money circulate the system trough taxes and benefits less can go wrong. Why do people need to receive hundreds of thousands of Euros for children daycare? It makes no sense whatsoever. Let the people keep the money, pay less taxes and pay the daycare centers from the government directly for each child. The bureaucracy is the real problem here.
When parents requested their paperwork they received hundreds of papers with all the real information blacked out. Imagine completely black papers. It was absolutely disgusting and the Dutch government even stepped down because of the whole affair. Amazingly the same political parties got elected again and are now in office in the same coalition as before...
The 'bulgaren-fraude' was the cause for the government to change policy (and I believe law) to be much stricter on fraud and be much more vigilant when trying to detect fraud. The current scandal is one of the end results here. An interesting intermediary result is that the culture at the tax-office changed to be much more about 'getting the fraudsters' and much less about 'helping people'. Throw on a bit of "bureaucrats trying to cover their own and their bosses' ass" when people accidentally get marked for fraud, and you start getting the results we have here.
I fear that this culture (both the citizen as adversary 'getting fraudsters' culture and the ass covering) is still in place, and much more widespread throughout the government. Similar things seem to be happening at the National Mining Institute trying to discredit earthquake damage in Groningen for one example.
<sarcasm> luckily when the government stepped down because of the last scandal, the new government was a big change and a big step towards fixing these attitudes </sarcasm>
Some of the not-so-savory/unlawful recent abuses I recall: - Going after "all" the rent allowance fraudsters that were, according to them, undermining and abusing the system.. Result: recovery effort dropped after it turned out the cost of running the fraud task force was an order of magnitude higher than what was recovered from the people defrauding the system.. - Illegally storing and going through millions of traffic camera images to go after fraudsters driving a few kilometres more than they declared. Result: stopped by the supreme court, on ground of unlawful privacy abuse. - Cross governmental agencies checks & cross database checks of different expenditures (heating, rent, telephone bills, online shopping etc) to make sure that some low-income families were not earning more than declared. Also declared unlawful.
The theme is recurrent: an abuse of power, and a propensity to break the law to extort money from lower class incomes mostly, as they are the least capable of pushing back.
The motives are unclear, but, fundamentally, the problem originates in a political will and ingrained mentality of distrust of their fellow citizens -especially the poor- and blaming them for not contributing to the taxation effort. Very ironic coming from a fiscal paradise. Even more ironic when you know that, until recently, Shell could write-off world-wide expenses as local loses, and thereby not pay taxes in the Netherlands. Well, Shell left for London, so at least that problem is solved.
No. It wasn't a cause, it was an excuse.
Even back then, politicians warned that by cranking down on the relative few "frauding Bulgarians" a lot of collatoral damage was imminent. A politician even refused to implement it because of this and resigned.
It was predicted to have this collatoral damage. I was publicly known that such fraud would be hard to fight at all, even if collatoral damage was accepted. And still, government wanted to appear tough so proceeded anyway.
It was a choice. Not a force of hand.
Whatever the stated reason was, they failed horribly at execution - by unfairly stereotyping and discriminating against innocent people.
There lots of other ways to combat tax fraud.
But the stated reason is still relevant, if only to check what the history and reasoning of the original plan was. Here it informs us how the tax office came to see citizens as adversaries, when that was not (or less so) their stance before 2016.
turned out that in the period 2007-2013, 805 Bulgarians
https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/artikelen/2021/bu...
It's not that simple, I know. But spending so much on bureaucratic red tape and fraud prevention is something that feels really silly with our current systems.
Every Swedish citizen and resident has a unique and dedicated number (date of birth followed by four digits), and you can use it in tandem with for example BankID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID) to authenticate yourself almost everywhere.
It would be extraordinarily hard to make up UBI claims for non-existing family members and receive payouts in Sweden. You would first have to convince the tax agency to register the fake person in order to get a new personal number, either as a newborn or immigrant, which either way is obviously subject to controls. You’d then have to keep this up through various mandatory interactions with government agencies without getting found out. It would probably be much more effort (not to mention stress) than just working for the same money.
There are special protections for illegal immigrants so it's reasonably easy to invent a family of them to collect benefits.
In addition, various US govts or even agencies within the same govt, often don't talk to one another.
So, when an old person dies, friends/family can keep collecting benefits.
See https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/mar/16/social-securit...
"Social Security records show that 6.5 million people in the US have reached the ripe old age of 112. In reality, only few could possibly be alive. As of last fall, there were only 42 people known to be that old in the entire world."
It's not just dead people.
"One Social Security number was used 613 times. An additional 194 numbers were used at least 50 times each."
Which, one again, circles to the point that the money, time, and effort spent on fighting such low level individual fraud typically vastly out-spends the actual fraud they're trying to combat.
And the fix was to cast too wide a net; instead of handling the individual cases, they instead tried to apply logic and rules to it; if (country == bulgaria) fraudPotential += 100 kinda thing.
Bonus: less can go wrong administratively too. Case in point: ever since the Dutch tax office had to also give out these kinds of wellfare/assistance funds, things have been a wreck at the tax office. It's been over a decade and it's no longer even their most important thing to fix...
I'm not joking here, but an office that has been focused on extracting money for literally centuries, with a strong emphasis on detecting fraudsters and sticking to laws and rules, doesn't have the culture to handle allowences for people in need.
The latter is a very human function. With lots of interpretations. The former is a very strict and rigid function.
which is why previously the latter was done by local authorities, often they even did it through proxies in the neighborhoods: something done by people, close to the people.
It's not about "daycare", it is about assisting families in the (massive) expenses that raising a child incurs. Why? Because unlike the American pension system which is mostly backed by the stock market, European pension systems depend on young and healthy workers to pay the pensions of the current pensioner generation.
Obviously this has the advantage that stock market crashes won't wipe out a whole generation's pensions and that the stock markets are not inflated artificially by enormous amounts of "dumb money" being loaded into anything that promises a profit (which is partially what caused the 2008ff crisis), but it has the disadvantage that society has to really take care of not falling into demographic traps.
On of the examples in a mother with 3 children who had to pay back a hundred thousand Euro that were classified as wrongly received benefits. That means she received tens of thousands of Euros per year! What an insane burden to put on mother.
If something goes wrong the consequences are gigantic. Just like it happened in this scandal.
I'm writing this from memory, so it may be wrong, but as I remember it: parents would receive "modest" support; a much larger part would go directly to the daycare, outside of the parents' view. Now if the daycare was deemed to be illegal/fraud/..., the parents would be on the hook for both the money they received as well as the money the daycare received.
Again, I may be misremembering - but this is definitely one way to put a mom into 100s of thousands of debt that she'd never seen.
They should stop doing that. The wealthy pay more taxes, so refund them as free childcare. If you think the wealthy are getting away with something under a universal entitlement, raise their taxes.
And considering GDP as the most important metric isn't peak dumbassery ?
Does it? Or is it just that the demographic issues are more readily apparent?
You can't eat the stock market, so you can accumulate as much wealth as you want in stock market-backed pensions plans or otherwise – if by the time you want to retire there aren't enough working-age people left around willing to provide you goods and services, your pension scheme is worth zilch.
Using investment returns to pay for retirement is no less dependent on young and healthy workers. Us retirees own the companies, working people work for them, and we skim the returns. It accomplishes the same thing but with less central planning. It's still vulnerable to demographic traps.
Which IMHO the European pension system is massively flawed as it's basically a Ponzi scheme that requires more and more people to keep the system going, more people that will consume more resources and need more real estate to live in, real-este which governments and banks have turned into a speculation vehicle making them unaffordable for the new generation of young people who are supposed to be many and pay into the system.
Add to that several other problems in NL in particular, and you have a recipe for disaster. One of the main reasons people with a median income have huge trouble finding a decent place to live.
flawed, maybe, it is actually been good for people that strted working in the 50s-60s, but a Ponzi scheme?
I don't see the connection.
Most pension systems in Europe are in balance and have no problem paying the pensions, the only real problem is that the population is growing older but people get their first job much later in life and the age of retirement is not advancing at the same rate of the aging of the population.
Many pensions in my country are contributing to the economy of the family, so they are not going into the pockets of some old grumpy grandparent that lives on the shoulders of the younger generations and spend 9 months/year cruising the Mediterranean sea, having breakfast in Venice, lunch in Split and dinner in Crete.
> real-este which governments and banks have turned into a speculation vehicle
real-estate is mostly a cost in Europe, unless you have a shitload of money.
Anything else is just an excuse to get higher budgets and grift.
But what would all the important middle men do for a living then? /s
Exchange some popular issue for access to user data, the same that happened with telephone providers. Just be realistic about it.
My first google search "harsh penalty deter crime" had this as the top:
>Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime. Laws and policies designed to deter crime by focusing mainly on increasing the severity of punishment are ineffective partly because criminals know little about the sanctions for specific crimes.
Ignoring the fact that such a system would be ripe for abuse and retaliatory behavior, just accidentally convicting an innocent person would absolutely ruin their life.
Getting wrongly convicted is already a huge tragedy. Now you'd be handing out life sentences basically.
Let's be real, it's not the rich people who tend to engage in benefits fraud and I'd argue most people who do this are in desperate situations.
There's a long list of examples of "fraud"; like many crimes it's a scale.
A €3.7 million + €2.75 million fines are a slap-on-the wrist for what happened. Even €30,000/case seems a pittance compared to its effects on people.
It mentions there were "secret blacklists of people for two decades" and that "authorities [were] hiding information or misleading the parliament about the facts".
I don't see how regulating algorithms and AI could affect those institutional injustices.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toeslagenaffaire has a lot of information, but it's in Dutch; the English version of this article isn't as fleshed out.
1) support costs for themselves (if they can't go back to the parents, this is of course a lot more than it would have been had there never been an intervention)
2) (if applicable) education costs (including the need to go for more expensive education due to age. For example, going for secondary education when already 20 years old costs a lot more than doing it at 15)
3) lost pay. This is years that they cannot work and earn, and counterintuitively this is the pay of the LAST years they're working
Of course CPS really prefers offloading all the usually massive costs of their "help" onto the children.
We as a society need to do better to incentivize good behavior for those in trusted government positions, and hold the individuals responsible when they betray that trust.
Too often political decisions have been predicated on the notion of cost-free bullying of lower status humans to serve as grist for the mills of polemical political opposition and discourse, to feed careers. The bullfighter needs a bull and ideally it should look scary before the predetermined outcome of slaying the scapegoat takes place.
While corporations and governments only punish the people with unilateral action of malice or ignorance, one can never truly punish an institution, one seeks individuals who are responsible in the hopes of reducing the willingness of individuals to commit such acts given the possibility of individual punishment.
Nothing says impunity like impunity.
Fining the institution does nothing to discourage career hit-and-ruin experts who keep climbing the career ladder upon the backs of others.
Because this is a dangerous technology which has only proven, again and again, to be unreliable, unethical, inaccurate, and is EASILY used by the people most likely to abuse it.
The point is not that the dutch tax office is corrupt, it is that corrupt individuals and entities are likely, and have used, this for nefarious, foul purposes. Regulating and/or banning its use is only one of many avenues to attempt to safeguard (against) this tech.
> the Dutch data protection agency also fined the Dutch tax administration €2.75 million in December 2021 for the “unlawful, discriminatory and therefore improper manner”
My point is that AI regulation is insufficient, not that it's unnecessary. Eg, the Amnesty International report says:
> civil servants spoke in denigrating terms about families with Caribbean roots, referring to them as an “Antillean nest”. Civil servants flagged these applicants through manual selection.
Manual selection is independent of AI.
Eg: FAANG, Disney, IKEA, Uber, Mars Chocolate, etc etc
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/03/25/wetsv...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
> Ireland has the BEPS tools to enable US IP-heavy multinationals to reroute global profits into Ireland, tax-free. The Netherlands then enables these Irish profits to get to a classical tax haven (e.g. the Cayman Islands or Jersey) without incurring EU withholding tax.
I empathise with your the confusion - corruption has enabled these companies to construct confusing and elaborate ways of avoiding their fair share of taxes.
But these are the actions OF THE STATE, not of said companies. Oh and if you think rerouting profits through Ireland is scandalous you should check out Royal Dutch Shell and their tax deal. And it's not just the Netherlands that does that, presidential Total does the same. And BP. But please don't think this is limited to oil companies, they're just the biggest fish in the pond. Their profits and payouts make Google look like a children's bank account, and WHO they go to is very telling.
https://www.reuters.com/article/global-oil-tax-havens-idUSKB...
States themselves, the people that make up the state, want to avoid taxes even more than multinationals do. You want this to stop? Your enemies are Royal Families, presidential Families (in France), dynasties in supreme courts of countries in the EU, political parties, ... these sorts of people. When it comes to payouts, by the way, these state companies make FANGs look like children's bank accounts.
And I would like to point out one major difference: these multinational billionnaires have at least done something for us, however ambivalent we may feel about their ethics. Dutch Royals have NEVER dug up any oil or so much as initiated a single green initiative at Shell. They have abused their power to get shares of these companies, and that's the sum total of their contribution. There is no ambivalence about ethics here: the people benefitting from these state cash cow companies have never contributed anything at all to these companies, nor do they intend to.
I'm not sure one can consider it corruption, per se, rather it's tax competition on the part of smaller EU states.
To my mind, it's not that the countries are being bribed by companies, rather that the laws attract a (far too small proportion of) global/EU revenue to be taxed in their country.
Taxation is not an EU competence so in general it is not within the power of the EU to declare a member state's tax policy to be illegal. Vestager has been trying to use state aid as a vehicle to circumvent that restriction but the ECJ rebuffed her attempt to do that in Ireland. A big part of the problem is that the state aid findings rely on the assertion that tax authorities applied special rules to one particular company, which is typically not the case.
The article doesn't even list all of the issues. For example, on top of the things you rightfully pointed out, this article also fails to mention is that (at least) 1115 children were taken away from their parents as a result of this, and despite this being known for more than half a year, not a single child has been returned to their parents[0]. There just seems to be zero interest by the authorities to help the people who went through life-destroying tragedies as a result of all this.
To paraphrase one comedian from the Dutch version of Have I Got News For You[1], "if one child would go missing tomorrow the entire country would be upside down, there would be search parties, the media would go crazy with the story. And yet at least 1115 children have been wrongfully taken from their families, we've known this for half a year, and nothing seems to happen."
[0] https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/10/over-1100-children-of-...
I use corruption in the dictionary definition sense. I guess you think that corruption only means bribery.
There was no personal gain nor illicit benefits gained by the civil servants responsible. For something to be corruption, the perpetrator has to gain something.
The next election, given that we don't have the new pandemic or war in Europe, will be the last one for Rutte, I believe.
As for the last of Rutte, I thought that we had seen that one election before the last and yet he's still there.
It's rotten to the core and to date there have been zero consequences for the perps and the damage continues to pile up. Our government has fallen over this and - surprise - the exact same players were re-elected without taking any responsibility for any of this.