In 2016, officials from the Tax and Customs Administration proposed that people who had to repay 3,000 euros or more in childcare allowance, without further investigation, put the label ‘Opzet / Gross Schuld’ (OSG). They may have lost the right to a payment arrangement or debt counseling from the municipality. The plan was to help the tax authorities to clear up a large backlog in applications for a payment arrangement.
This appears from a Friday memo that surfaced this week. State Secretary Alexandra van Huffelen (Toeslagen) sent the memo to the Lower House on Friday.
Earlier it became clear that of the many thousands of people accused of OSG, 96 percent wrongly received this stamp. Van Huffelen had an investigation carried out and that has brought to light the memo from 2016.
Whether the proposal was actually implemented is now being further investigated. “But one of the lessons of the past period is that these kinds of signals must be taken very seriously,” says Van Huffelen. “And these signals also fit with stories I hear about this in my conversations with duped parents.”
The State Secretary promises that “given the seriousness” she will “get to the bottom of this matter”. She also wants to investigate how it is possible that parents who have never received the OSG stamp, in their own words, were nevertheless confronted with accusations of fraud in debt relief processes.
Van Huffelen also reports that the House was previously incorrectly told that up to 2017 people with an allowance debt of up to EUR 1,500 could always receive a payment arrangement. “A small sample shows that this method does not always seem to have been followed in practice.”
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