“Black fraud list from the tax authorities was in violation of privacy law” | Interior

The Ministry of Finance confirms this after reporting by RTL Nieuws and Trouw. This concerns the Fraud Signaling Facility (FSV), which has registered a total of around 180,000 citizens. A recent privacy test proved that far too many civil servants had access to the list. Researchers also criticize the way in which the data was collected.

The Tax and Customs Administration already started working with findings from the draft report at the beginning of last year. For example, the number of civil servants who had access to the FSV has been reduced from 5,000 to 1,000. After the journalists had asked questions about the system and the results of the privacy test, the draft report was submitted to a special privacy officer. It was then decided to stop the system until all recommendations from the report were adopted.

There is a lot wrong with the FSV, the report shows. For example, hardly any distinction is made between the types of signals that citizens may have committed fraud. A request for more information weighs just as heavily as a “vague click notification” or a concrete indication, such as a false invoice. This may even lead to a “blacklist” effect, the researchers said.

Incomplete or incorrect image

In addition, the system has become a repository of data. “Data quality is a risk because registration in FSV does not take place uniformly, the distinction between objective and subjective information is insufficiently clear and obsolete information is permanently processed,” the researchers write. “The result is that an incomplete, incorrect and / or outdated image of data subjects is created in the processing of data, also outside FSV.”

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