“The farm was sold from under my ass”

Margreet (59) was a victim of the benefits affair and lived in a forest of nettles and beans for years: “I didn't exist before a municipality”

By Niels Rigter

2 hours ago in Inland

Margreet ten Pas is one of the hardest hit victims of the benefits affair. She hid confidently in a vacation home in the woods, where she could stink nettles and beans. Her case shows that the compensation arrangements may be unrecognized and that the bill for the recovery operation can rise much further.

Uiteindelijk zat Margreet ten Pas (59) als slachtoffer van de toeslagenaffaire met een schuld van een ton. “De paarden, alle honden, alles moest weg.”

In the end, Margreet ten Pas (59) was the victim of the benefits affair with a ton of debt. “The horses, all the dogs, everything had to go.”

Ten Pas (59), mother of six children, had it done with her home in De Wolden in Drenthe, where her boys could ride motocross bikes and the girls on ponies across the country. “I had fifty great dogs.” She bred a Dutch version of the Old English Bulldog, the bullbiter. “Healthy dogs, without those popular crooked legs and short tails. I had the DNA laid down enormously.”

The tax authorities recovered all childcare benefits at the same time

In 2007, she applied for childcare allowance for four of her children, but it was not paid out. The following year, she made a new application, without success. For a year, she called and wrote repeatedly, stopped by the tax office. At the end of that year, the tax authorities immediately issued surcharges for the whole of 2008. Three weeks later, the tax authorities reclaimed everything.

Indeed, they would have been frauded. How, she was never told that. As a single, divorced mother with a high amount of requested benefits, she apparently fell into an established risk box, suspects her lawyer Cyril Spiertz. “The tax authorities algorithm removed and puked up all the risk cases, where suspicion was enough to accuse someone and rigorously return money.”

Margreet (59) lived on nettles and chestnuts

One of her older daughters had a vacation home in the woods where her mother could stay less than a sixties. “I make dog food from the butcher's by-products. I sold that; it brought me 15 to 30 euro a week. That's what I lived on. You can also eat a lot from nature, nettles, ground leaves, wild garlic, chestnuts, etc.”

That wasn't idyllic. “After two years in the woods, I once called my sister. She said: “Wow, what birds I belong to you”. Birds? I hadn't heard anything all these years, I was so sedated.”

Bureaucratic swamp: it turned out not to exist for the municipality

Because she had crawled out of the woods at the time, but it turned out not to exist for the municipality. “I was registered as 'leaving abroad'. I was unable to apply for benefits because I did not have an account and a mailing address. Then Jetta Klijnsma arranged a postal address for me and other allowance parents raised money so that I could pay for an ID card. I had to 'file a foreign tax' for the years after I didn't write — can you imagine what kind of bureaucratic swamp you'll end up in?”

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Slachtoffer van de toeslagenaffaire Margreet ten Pas: „Ik ga niet voor een pot met geld, het gaat om het principe: de Staat is hier de dader, die de schade moet herstellen.”

Victim of the allowance affair Margreet ten Pas: “I'm not going for a pot of money, it's about the principle: the State is the perpetrator here, who must repair the damage.”

Margreet was with the first parents who were compensated, not before the recovery operation had started. In the end, she received 200,000 euros. Attorney Spiertz now has a civil case before her to practically get all her damages through the courts. This means: an overall picture of lost income, an assessment of psychological suffering among all family members and reasonable pain. The first step had already been taken by Spiertz to court before Margreet and three other affected parents that the State acted unlawfully in the Benefits affair.