Compensation scheme for affected parents: billion-dollar drama

By ANNEMARIE VAN GAAL

Yesterday, 19:15 in COLUMNS

Sometimes a small message will make you fall off your seat. That happened to me earlier this month when I heard that compensating those affected by the childcare allowance drama could cost an additional 5 billion euros.

Five billion?! Nowadays, our government only communicates in billions of euros, so we are no longer afraid of a billion more or less, but those 5 billion euros are in addition to the 9 billion euros already spent. And are we there, with the 14 billion euros? At the slow pace at which the review of the files is currently taking place, it will take at least until 2030 before everything is dealt with. So how many billions of euros did we spend on it?

In 2020, it was not assumed that the compensation scheme for the affected parents would cost around 500 million euros. But yes, it was also not accepted that the renovation of the Binnenhof would cost 500 million euros. The renovation now appears to cost around 2 billion euros. Idiotic overshooting of costs, of course, but a pittance compared to the completely idiotic violation of the compensation schemes for childcare allowance parents.

Ambitious device

That 14 billion euros means that each file of a affected family costs 400,000 euros to handle. Part of this is distributed to compensation for parents, former partners and children, but the vast majority goes to the costs of the extensive and completely inefficient administrative system that must determine the amount of compensation.

Look, it is of course worrying that the tax authorities are being so mishandled with the recovery of surcharges that have caused parents to get into trouble. But I also find a government that then squanders 14 billion euros in compensation and, in particular, on the official bureaucracy surrounding compensation, is also very worrying.

And it would be even more worrying if this further overrun of costs continued without anyone in The Hague being able to fight. Nor does it seem like a single politician who dares to speak out critically when it comes to childcare allowance. Nice and easy, it's not their money. No, it's true that it's money, taxpayers' money that's being thrown over the bar here.

saints

Among the 35,000 parents, there are undeniably many victims, but also fraudsters. Not all are saints, although they are all treated that way now.

Even fraudsters who had already scammed the tax authorities ten times of the Bulgarian fraud have now received compensation. There are also many parents among the affected parents who are trying to make a living and claim compensation that is many times higher than the material and immaterial damage suffered. If they can make it plausible, they won't get it done yet either. Not only does the government emphasize them as saints, but our usually critical media also make it possible to discuss compensation for benefit parents.

The Secretary of State and the official top are responsible for the compensation; they are clearly unable to do this cheaply. It would have been replaced a long time ago in business, why doesn't that actually happen to the government? Exactly the same thing happens when it comes to compensating the people of Groningen: ten to fifteen percent of the amount intended for compensation went to the affected people of Groningen and the rest was spent on administrative bureaucracy and disappeared into the pockets of hired experts, assessors and lawyers.

Deaf to complaints

The fact that a government makes mistakes in directly recovering childcare benefits and is subsequently deaf to complaints is worrying. That is why we have also launched a parliamentary survey that meticulously found out what went wrong here and how we can avoid it in the future. But a government that spends more than 14 billion euros on compensation, whose composition is spent on pointless administrative costs, is just as worrying. It's fun and daunting that costs tons of money. Shouldn't we even have a parliamentary survey about this?

Another thing, as an entrepreneur, knows that you have to set limits when it comes to projects: deadlines, go/no-go moments and tight budgets that you must stick to, otherwise you will go bankrupt.

Why doesn't that work for the government? Why didn't our government insist at the beginning, when it would cost a maximum of 500 million euros, that someone would be responsible to arrange it for this amount? Why not outsource such a compensation operation to an entrepreneur with a social heart, who works functionally and powerfully and can charge a maximum compensation of, for example, 5% in costs for his execution? In the future, the government will often make mistakes that need to be compensated, but then realize what you can and cannot do as a government and consider investing it out.