4 years after the benefits affair, victims are still fighting for redress: 'That's really a scandal'

March 8, 2023, 17:22 • Updated April 13, 2023, 2:04 AM • 3 minutes of reading time

© RTV Utrecht

Utrecht - For two months, Mirika Muller from Amersfoort received too much childcare allowance. Little did she know at the time that this mistake would rule her life for years. She's not in a comfortable situation at the time anyway. From a stay-at-home, she tries to rebuild her life. The single mother of two sons is classed as a fraud. The government is relentless. All surcharges are reclaimed.

“I suddenly had huge debts and burned out. I couldn't give my kids anything nice and my eldest son even had to take care of me. My son just had a life at school and he saw that other kids were better off. Fun trips and new shoes were just not feasible for him.”

Today, on International Women's Day, the victims of the benefits affair are again asking the government to accelerate its efforts to solve the problems that arose after the hunt for benefits fraudsters intensified. Between 2004 and 2019, around 24,000 people were classified as payment fraudsters. They had made mistakes when applying for childcare allowance or were misinformed by childcare agencies or childcare centers. As a result, they had to repay all surcharges received. With childcare allowance, this quickly amounts to thousands of euros.

Four years after the benefits affair, victims are still fighting for redress

Files

Among other things, the victims want insight into the files that the government has built up about them. This is how they try to find out why they were classified as fraudsters. That is still unclear to some victims. But according to the government, that is too complex. The tax authorities work with all kinds of different and sometimes outdated computer systems, so it is a lot of work to request all the information. MP Renske Leijten of the SP was also present at the demonstration today and finds it difficult to suppress her anger about it.

“It wasn't complex at all to make these parents the victim of an unprecedented fraud hunt and deprive them of thousands of euros. That wasn't complex and to restore it, it suddenly is. Anyone can request his or her file. The fact that the tax authorities use so many systems is their own fault. These people just want to know why they were singled out. But you see in this story that everyone values the processes and systems more than the solution.”

Removals

An enormously painful result of the benefits scandal is that some victims were in such a bind that their children were placed out of their homes. That also happened to Mirika from Amersfoort. Fighting back tears, she explains how her son went off the rails while she herself was deeply in debt after being classified as a payment fraud.

“He got the wrong friends who promised him everything. He was quite impressionable and at some point, you just lose control of your child. He was young and also wanted nice things. A child like that is so vulnerable that I just lost him.”

And Mirika is not the only one who has happened to this. The CBS calculated that more than 2,000 children of victims of the benefits scandal were removed from home. Some of them are still not back with their parents. Mirika's son will also not return to his mother in the near future. She thinks this would not have happened without the benefits scandal.

The benefits scandal affects many women, remarkably often with a migration background. According to the Foundation for the Recovery of Unprecedented Injustice, which is organizing the demonstration, around 70 percent of the victims are single mothers.