The Dutch government will decide on Friday whether to step down over a growing scandal in which tax officials have wrongly accused thousands of parents of fraud and plunged many families into debt by ordering them to repay childcare allowances.
The opposition leader of the Labor Party, Lodewijk Asscher, who was Minister of Social Affairs in the previous government, resigned on Thursday over the matterand denies that he knew the tax authorities were “hunting thousands of families wrong,” but that the government had become an enemy of its people if it conceded a failed system.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he opposed the dissolution of the current coalition, arguing that the Netherlands needed stability amid the coronavirus pandemic, but did not rule it out. The cabinet will review its position at a regular meeting on Friday.
The four ruling parties in Rutte’s coalition are deeply divided in their response to a damning report on the scandal, but are presumably elected to end their alliance rather than follow up on a planned parliamentary debate on the report next Tuesday. to lose a vote of no confidence.
The MPs’ report, entitled Unknown Injustice, was published last month following an investigation into the childcare benefit scandal involving public questioning of officials up to and including Rutte.
It is established that the Dutch tax authorities “violated fundamental principles of the rule of law”, with fraud investigations into families caused by “something as simple as an administrative error, without any malicious intent”.
The chairman of the inquiry committee, Chris van Dam, called the system “a mass process in which there was no room for nuance”, with more than 20,000 working families being prosecuted before the courts, and recommending that child support benefits be returned paid and denied the right from 2012 over several years appeal.
Some were pushed close to bankruptcy or forced to move home by unfair claims for tens of thousands of euros when the alleged fraud resulted in a wrongly completed form or a missing signature. Several couples divorced under the strain.
Government ministers, MPs, civil servants and court judges all bore their responsibility, the report concluded, recommending that ‘everyone in the state apparatus should ask how such a thing can be prevented again’.
The government apologized for the tax office’s method and set aside more than € 500 million (£ 450 million) in compensation in March last year, about € 30,000 for each family.
Following allegations of racial profiling, the tax authority also acknowledged that 11,000 dual-national families were singled out for special investigation. However, Dutch prosecutors refused to investigate possible discrimination and said they had found no evidence of criminal offenses.
“Responsibility for criminal acts that can be attributed to the state should be sought in the political domain and not in criminal law,” state prosecutors said last week.
Twenty of the families involved this week took legal action against ministers of three of the parties in Rutte’s current coalition over their role in the scandal, claiming they have criminal negligence through failure to govern, discriminate and violate 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 Taxation Menno Snel – as well as Asscher – are all mentioned in the cases submitted to the Dutch High Court.
The fate of the government is mostly in the hands of Rutte’s coalition partners, with at least one leader – Sigrid Kaag of the social-liberal D66 party – saying this week that political consequences of the parliamentary report were inevitable.
If it collapses, the government will remain in a position of oversight until a new coalition is formed, with general elections in March and Rutte and its center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy performing strongly in polls.