Prime Minister Mark Rutte and former members of government in the previous cabinet Lodewijk Asscher, Eric Wiebes and Frans Weekers are partly responsible for the brutal fraud approach that led to the dramatic childcare allowance affair. The Parliamentary Interrogation Committee Childcare Allowance writes in the final report on Thursday Unprecedented Injustice that the four men as participants in the Ministerial Committee on Fraud Combat “have co-initiated a tough approach to fraud”.
It concerns an anti-fraud committee set up in 2013 under the leadership of Prime Minister Rutte.
Then State Secretary Weekers (VVD) set up the tough approach, Asscher (PvdA) approved the more intensive fight against fraud as Minister of Social Affairs, aimed at childcare allowance.
Weekers’ successor Wiebes (VVD) was aware of abuses in the fraud hunt since August 2017, but it took until June 2019 before State Secretary Menno Snel became clear about the scale and impact of the fraud hunt that got out of hand.
“Until then, the ministers discussed here had often linked signals that they received to incidental cases; the fact that the problems were much broader was a blind spot for them.”
Commission President Chris van Dam (CDA) said during the presentation of the report that ministers and civil servants could and should have intervened at various times.
The committee finds in the report that the fundamental principles of the rule of law have been violated in the rock-hard approach to fraud.
Commission is harsh on failing all state powers
The cabinet, parliament and even the judiciary have played a part in the injustice done to tens of thousands of innocent parents. These are the most important findings of the Parliamentary Interrogation Committee Childcare Allowance, which issued the final report on Thursday. Unprecedented Injustice presents.
“During its activities, the committee first came to this realization with astonishment and finally with deep indignation,” the committee writes. “It urges all concerned state powers to consult themselves on how to prevent a repetition in the future and how to correct the injustice that has arisen.”
According to the committee, “the political need” to organize the benefits process efficiently and the political and social desire to prevent fraud has led to rock-hard legislation, with insufficient room to take individual situations into account.
The judiciary has also failed to prevent drama
The approach taken by the Tax and Customs Administration whereby entire groups of parents were regarded as fraudsters without an individual test – the so-called “all-or-nothing approach” has, according to the committee, “grossly infringed the rule of law that optimum justice must be done to individual situations”. The Ministry of Social Affairs has also made mistakes. The way in which this ministry has fulfilled its responsibility is, according to the committee, “far below par”.
The committee also finds that the judiciary has not been able to stop the injustice. According to the committee, administrative law has for years “made a substantial contribution” to maintaining the rock-hard fraud hunt.
An overheated political climate, as a result of which a small mistake in the application for the allowance was seen as fraud, the harsh approach of the Tax and Customs Administration and the absence of the Ministry of Social Affairs in signaling the negative effects of the disproportionately harsh approach led, according to the committee. to a “sum of incapacity”, which left the affected parents no chance for years to be right.
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