At 750 households that were on the list, the tax authorities stopped benefits for no apparent reason, writes NRC, which saw the investigation. Thousands of others were placed under increased surveillance, leaving them in financial precariousness.
FSV list
Beginning of last year was already revealed by RTL Nieuws and Trouw that the Tax and Customs Administration has been working with the so-called Fraud Signaling Facility (FSV) since 2014, and even with a predecessor since 2001. Citizens entered the registration system through ‘suspicions’ or ‘signals’ of fraud. It grew into a register of hundreds of thousands of names.
For example, people could end up on the list because of tips from ex-partners, or sometimes even if they called the Tax Authorities themselves with questions about their own allowances.
Genelva Hendrison from Rotterdam got into big trouble when it turned out that she was on the blacklist. “I felt treated like a criminal,” she previously told RTL Nieuws:
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The system was taken down in a hurry at the beginning of last year after a report condemned the method. What was not clear until now is what consequences a place on the list had for citizens. This is now apparent from the PwC report, which according to NRC has been circulating at the Ministry of Finance for weeks, but has not yet been sent to the House.
Evidence
Those on the list sometimes had to provide supporting documents to substantiate the right to supplement. If one mistake was made, the surcharge was stopped. For others, this happened the moment they landed on the list, without any research being done.
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The register also sometimes contained sensitive matters such as ethnicity and nationality, medical data, judicial history and leases. It also proved virtually impossible to get off the list, once on it.
Small part of total
Incidentally, the supervisory team of the Tax and Customs Administration that dealt with the files and was investigated by PwC is not the fraud team that became notorious because of the allowance affair. The group that has been studied forms only a small part of the total. It also remains to be seen whether the citizens who ran into problems can count on compensation.
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