ANP
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NOS News•today, 18:36
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Who are the benefit parents exactly? That question was not easy to answer. Today, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) released figures for the first time about the background of the hitherto known victims in the benefits affair.
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What is striking: Surinamese and Caribbean Dutch have been hit relatively hard. In half of the cases it concerns single parents. And, perhaps most striking: there are many parents who were on social assistance when the Tax and Customs Administration started to reclaim allowances. They can apply for childcare allowance if they are on a journey to work.
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Out of every two hundred Surinamese, one is affected
Statistics Netherlands has examined the data of 10,265 families. It was established on 1 April that all these parents were victims of the allowance affair.
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70 percent of this group of parents are migrants or children of a migrant. This mainly concerns Surinamese Dutch (1830 families), Caribbean Dutch (1275), Turkish (800), Moroccan (615) and Indonesian (165).
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This shows that certain (migrant) groups have been hit harder than others:
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Dutch Caribbean victims relatively most often
| How much of the total group suffered in the allowance affair | |
| Caribbean Dutch | 1 op 136 |
| Surinamese Dutch | 1 op 197 |
| Turkish Dutch | 1 op 538 |
| Moroccan Dutch | 1 op 681 |
| Indonesian Dutch | 1 op 2119 |
| Dutch people without a migration background | 1 op 4386 |
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It was assumed that the allowances affair almost exclusively concerned working parents. The new figures show that a fifth of households were on social assistance when they were hit by the allowance affair.
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Moreover, the letters from the tax authorities often ended up in families that were already struggling with debts. Two-thirds of benefit parents already had more debts than assets when the tax authorities knocked on their door with claims of often thousands of euros.
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