Will these Nijverdal benefit victims soon be homeless due to debt? “We don’t have the money”

For years – from 2004 to 2019 – the Tax Authorities wrongly classified tens of thousands of Dutch families with childcare benefits as fraudsters. The first signals that something was going wrong in the fight against fraud were heard as early as 2012, but it was not until 2017 that it was on the political agenda. After years of political and official scheming, the entire Rutte III cabinet resigned in 2021 over the affair.

Somewhere between 30,000 and 70,000 families have been affected by this benefits scandal. The tax authorities sometimes reclaimed tons of allegedly wrongly received childcare allowance and fines. The consequences were dramatic. People lost homes and businesses, more than 1,100 children were removed from their homes and citizens who saw no way out fell into psychological distress.

To this day, it is not exactly clear why the Tax Authorities labeled people as fraudsters and initiated a refund. Through the State Secretary, it has been admitted that there was ‘broad’ ‘ethnic profiling’, but how broad that was (or is) and what it involved is still shrouded in mystery.