Almost the entire House supports the conclusions of the fraud policy survey report | Politics

The motion was submitted by GroenLinks-PvdA, the second largest party in the House of Representatives. Normally the largest party submits a motion on the findings of an inquiry committee, but the PVV did not want to simply adopt these findings.

During the first part of the debate, which was held on Tuesday, the other forming parties – VVD, NSC and BBB – were also reluctant to record the findings. But on Thursday it turned out that these parties do support the motion.

Ultimately, the motion leaves a lot of room for the interpretation of the nineteen recommendations. The parties express that some recommendations require political choices and require further elaboration. But broadly speaking, a majority supports the conclusions of the committee of inquiry.

Ontvang meldingen bij nieuws over het toeslagenschandaal Stay informed with notifications

It is a myth that the so-called Bulgarian fraud in 2013 led to the benefits scandal, committee member Thierry Aartsen (VVD) said during the debate on Thursday. According to the committee, the derailed approach to fraud is based on laws that are twenty years old.

In 2013, there was a lot of social and political commotion when it became known that a group of Bulgarians had committed fraud with Dutch benefits. Shortly afterwards, the Tax Authorities introduced a controversial risk model, which meant that people were checked more often if they were seen as a risk.

The law on this was adopted by all parties in the House of Representatives in 2013. The stricter approach after the Bulgarian fraud is seen as an important cause of the benefits scandal. But the foundation for the problems in fraud policy was laid earlier, says Aartsen.

Aartsen points to mistakes that were made when drafting the law on the benefits system in 2004. According to Aartsen, this created a system that was very susceptible to fraud, because the government paid advances of benefits without thorough prior checks.

The choice for the Tax Authorities to pay out the benefits also caused problems. The tax authorities did not pay out some of the advances on time. “The tax authorities are set up to collect,” says Aartsen.

Several warnings have been issued about the major errors in the implementation and the problems in the benefits system. The cabinet and the House of Representatives have hardly done anything with those warnings.

“It’s not all the fault of bad legislation,” says Aartsen. The report already concluded that politics and administrative institutions were “blind to people’s rights”. But according to Aartsen, better legislation could have prevented a lot of misery.

Earlier in the debate, committee chairman Michiel van Nispen (SP) said that the government discriminated on origin and income in its approach to fraud. According to Van Nispen, this was the result of the political decision to detect fraudsters using risk models. As a result, the Tax Authorities mainly looked at a relatively small group of people where, according to the model, the risk of fraud was greatest.

“Certain groups of people have more often been identified by the implementation organization as possible fraudsters,” Van Nispen said in the parliamentary debate about the committee’s conclusions. “That was no coincidence, but the result of policy and choices in implementation.” People of non-Dutch descent, with a low income and single mothers were disproportionately checked.

Van Nispen tells the House of Representatives that that should not have been allowed. “That is contrary to the fundamental right to equal treatment.”

Om een vraag te kunnen stellen dien je in te loggen. Log in of maak binnen 1 minuut jouw gratis account aan.