Reopening of 460 Fraud Cases due to Illegal Data Collection by Dutch Employee Insurance Agency

The Dutch Employee Insurance Agency is reopening the 460 completed fraud cases of benefit recipients who have been unlawfully monitored and have therefore received a sanction.

In these 460 cases, it is being investigated whether the data used was obtained lawfully, says a spokesperson for the UWV to the NOS. Potentially affected benefit recipients must be informed of this soon. Moreover, three of these 460 unemployment benefit recipients have already requested a review of the decision. This has already happened in one of these cases, because illegal data collection ‘very likely played a substantial role’, the spokesperson said.

For the fraud algorithm in question, called Risicoscan Verblijf Buitenland, tracking cookies were used to track all website visitors to uwv.nl and werk.nl. The IP addresses of both logged in and non-logged in website visitors are checked by the UWV to determine the visitor’s location. For example, it was examined whether unemployment recipients were staying abroad unlawfully. As a result, data was also collected from visitors for whom there was no concrete reason for this. In some cases, the tracking cookies followed website visitors for up to six months, linking all visits during that period. The use of this tracking data is only permitted if there is an explicit suspicion of an infringement.

After the State Attorney criticized the system last February and stated that there was no legal basis for it, the UWV stopped using it. The 580 investigations that were still ongoing at the time had been stopped. However, more than 3,000 investigations had already been started as of 2019, of which a sanction was imposed in 460 cases, such as stopping benefits and issuing fines. Although the data had been collected illegally, the UWV initially did not intend to review these matters. The institute has now changed its mind.

By the way, the data collected by the controversial algorithm has not yet been deleted. The benefits agency would be ‘prepared’ to remove the illegally obtained data from the system. Outgoing Social Affairs Minister Van Gennip writes to the House of Representatives that ‘some’ data from the algorithm is needed again to reassess the 460 cases.

2023-10-19 13:21:00
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