Tax authorities searched online for information about citizens

The tax authorities have extensively extracted taxpayers' personal information — including social media statements — from the Internet, stored it in a computer system and used it to monitor and combat fraud. This happened despite internal doubts about its legality and about the “origin, accuracy and topicality” of the stored data. That's what NRC writes.The data was stored in the controversial Risk Analysis Model (RAM) database, whose large-scale deployment was unveiled by NRC this spring. According to an internal report, RAM — which came into use at the turn of the century — was used for 'profiling', including on the basis of nationality. RAM also provided “wonder addresses”, where, according to the collected data, there were possibly different (read: suspicious) behavioral patterns.

Fees Department

RAM was also deployed in the Benefits Department, something that was previously denied to the House by Secretary of State Van Rij. Customs also used RAM, as did the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD). The tax authorities also controlled its own employees with the system with a view to “achieving production goals, production quality, anonymous aggregated overviews and integrity testing”. The self-built database contained “data with a highly confidential nature, given the fiscal, financial and/or personal nature of the data,” NRC quotes from the internal analysis. “A lot of sensitive data from a lot of people is being brought together.” Through RAM, tax authorities also had access to information about any criminal prosecution or investigation. The tax authorities collected data from dozens of sources, inside and outside the government, so that hundreds of different data were stored per citizen. Through searches, it was possible to 'relate almost everything to everything', says the internal analysis.Source: NRC