The Dutch government will decide on Friday whether to renounce a growing scandal in which the tax authorities unfairly accuse thousands of parents of fraud, leaving many families in debt by ordering them to return the childcare allowance.
The leader of the opposition Labor Party, Lodewijk Asscher, who was Minister of Social Affairs in the previous government, resigned the case on Thursday, denying that it knew that the tax authority was “wrongly hunting thousands of families”, but admitting that a flawed system “had made the government an enemy of its people”.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he opposes the dissolution of the current coalition, arguing that the Netherlands needs stability amid the coronavirus pandemic, but has not ruled it out. The cabinet will review its position at a regular meeting on Friday.
The four ruling parties in the Rutte coalition are deeply divided in their response to a damning report on the scandal, but prefer to end their alliance rather than risk losing a vote of no confidence next Tuesday after a planned parliamentary debate on the report .
The parliamentarians’ report, entitled Unprecedented Injustice, was published last month after an investigation into the child care benefits scandal that included public interrogation of officials as far as Rutte.
He established that “fundamental principles of the rule of law have been violated” by the Dutch tax authority, with investigations of family fraud triggered by “something as simple as an administrative error, without any malicious intent”.
Investigating committee chairman Chris van Dam called the system “a mass process in which there was no room for nuance”, with more than 20,000 working families sued for fraud in the courts, ordered to reimburse child support benefits and denied the right to appeal over several years from 2012.
Some were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy or forced to relocate for unfair claims of tens of thousands of euros, when the alleged fraud consisted of an incorrectly filled out form or the lack of a signature. Several couples broke up under the strain.
Government ministers, deputies, civil servants and judges all have their share of responsibility, the report concluded, recommending that “everyone in the state apparatus should ask how it can be avoided again”.
The government apologized for the tax administration’s methods and, in March last year, set aside more than € 500 million (£ 450 million) in compensation, about € 30,000 for each family.
After accusations of racial discrimination, the tax authority also admitted that 11,000 dual nationality families were selected for a special examination. However, Dutch prosecutors refused to open an investigation into possible discrimination, saying they found no evidence of criminal offenses.
“Responsibility for culpable acts attributable to the state should be sought in the political domain and not in criminal law,” public prosecutors said last week.
Twenty of the families involved this week have filed legal action against ministers from three of the parties in the current Rutte coalition for their role in the scandal, alleging criminal negligence for failure to good governance, discrimination and violation of children’s rights.
The Minister of Health, Tamara van Ark, the Minister of Finance, Wopke Hoekstra, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Eric Wiebes, the former Minister of Finance Menno Snel – as well as Asscher – are all mentioned in the case documents, filed in the Supreme Court Dutch court.
The government’s fate is mainly in the hands of Rutte’s coalition partners, with at least one leader – Sigrid Kaag of the social-liberal party D66 – saying this week that the political consequences of the parliamentary report were inevitable.
If it collapses, the government will remain interim until a new coalition is formed, with general elections scheduled for March and Rutte and his center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy performing strongly in the polls.