eva gonzalez perez

Eva Gonzálex Pérez: “When I see that someone thinks they are above the law, I explode”

November 15, 2021 BY JORIS RIETBROEK

The Access to Justice Golden Hourglass 2021 was awarded in early November to Eva Gonzálex Pérez, the lawyer who exposed the benefits affair. But don't call her 'the lawyer who overthrew a cabinet'. The political consequences are secondary to her; helping her clients get justice, that's what matters.

Photos: Roel Dijkstra Photography

The amount of human suffering behind the childcare allowance affair is hard to comprehend, with thousands of victims alone who have ended up in debt restructuring, evicted from their homes or whose children have been removed from home. The total number of victims now stands at no less than 50,000.

Perhaps this scandal would have been swept under the rug if one woman had not tirelessly committed herself to a number of individual allowance cases. Or if her perseverance had been just a little less strong. Or what if her husband didn't show her a handful of letters one day? Letters in which the tax authorities announced without motivation that they would stop the childcare allowance.

So you see: the smallest, sometimes accidental ripples can cause the biggest wave movements. So much has become clear in the past seven years that lawyer Eva Gonzálex Perez works almost every day with the monster that has come to be called the benefits affair. An affair with unprecedented consequences.

Gonzálex Pérez has been assisting more than forty victims since the end of 2014. All parents who have run into serious problems due to the actions of the tax authorities. Several of her clients climbed up to nominate her for the Access to Justice Golden Hourglass, just to give back. A small selection of what they wrote about their lawyer: “She is a strong person with perseverance, she is a fighter.” “She has achieved so much; without her, the benefits affair would never have been revealed.” “Thanks to her, I have my life back that ruined the tax authorities.”

Her own clients have already exercised their rights and have been - partly - compensated, but the book about the benefits affair is far from closed. “I think the worst is yet to come,” says Gonzálex Pérez in her office at the Trias Law Collective in Helmond, when she talks about the current state of affairs. “This story started seven years ago, but it's not over yet. I myself am still working on it every day, and in the meantime, thousands of parents, whom I cannot assist, have still not been compensated.”

Your own office in Helmond

Gonzálex Pérez has been a social lawyer for twenty years now. At a commercial office where she worked for a blue Monday, she was not happy (“too much bombardment”). In 2007, she and two other lawyers founded the Trias Law Collective, on the edge of the center in Helmond. The three came from the Rechtshulp Zuid Advocaten Foundation, where, to their chagrin, they saw how a highly paid board of directors mainly maintained themselves, while 25 lawyers worked up a sweat. Their new adventure came at the right time; shortly after their departure, Legal Aid South went bankrupt.

“It's a shame things went wrong at Legal Aid South, but it did give us the opportunity to start our own office; something I've always wanted,” Gonzálex Pérez looks back. In the years before the benefits affair occurred, she focused mainly on employment law, social services and assisting psychiatric patients with their mental health care admission. The help of the TRIAS lawyers regularly went beyond legal assistance. “We had people over who no longer even received social assistance benefits. That's what we went shopping for. If you are wronged as a person, I will take you in if necessary.”

Until 2014, Gonzálex Pérez had barely had to deal with the tax authorities. Until one day, her husband showed her a few letters addressed to parents who were affiliated with his childminding agency. It stated without any explanation that the childcare allowance had been discontinued. “At first, I reacted soberly: 'they ask for data and original documents, so hand them in and it will be fine'. However, it remained silent after that, and despite several calls, people received no information. To find out why the allowance had been stopped, they had to formally file an objection.”

When the first unmotivated rejections to the objections arrived in the fall of 2014 — “you haven't provided all the information, you have to object” — Gonzálex Perez decided to get involved. “I was particularly surprised, but the deadlines were running out, so I just filed new objections without knowing exactly what to do. I started litigating in court, first on behalf of one woman. We gave notice of default to the tax authorities and asked for an interim injunction. This provision was not granted, but I won the substantive procedure in November 2015.”

The lawyer thought this would end the cold, but the tax authorities continued to litigate. Then I even started litigating on behalf of other parents in multiple courts, always with the same story; an appeal against the rejection of the objection. Nevertheless, the tax authorities ordered parents to submit evidence and show that they were entitled to a allowance, even if they had already been stopped by the Benefits Department itself earlier in the year. Of course, that's not possible.”

She quickly discovered how several parents “stuck” in the objection phase; the tax authorities did not decide. On the Ombudsman's recommendation, the lawyer filed complaints with the tax authorities on behalf of her clients, but these were also ignored. When the Ombudsman — as the first official body — launched a further investigation in November 2016, 140 similar appeals appeared to be on the shelf.

The tax authorities did not want a solution

In March 2017, Gonzálex Pérez won her case before the Council of State on behalf of her first client. She ruled that the tax authorities had wrongly stopped the childcare allowance of the parents who were customers of her husband's childcare agency. “I thought it would be done by then, but no... The top of the tax authorities did not want to participate in a compensation plan, while I was promised a total solution. They kept asking for extra data. “No,” I kept saying, it's up to the tax authorities to explain why the allowance was stopped.”

Discussions with the service's management went wrong. That was the time for the lawyer to stop the negotiations and approach Pieter Omtzigt, then a member of parliament for the CDA. “He was already working with the tax authorities at that time. I got an answer back within ten minutes; he knew my business and wanted to know more.” Omtzigt asked Parliamentary questions for the first time in July 2017; many more would follow.

The Parliamentary questions and associated answers were eventually picked up by journalists from Trouw and RTL News, who began to pay extensive attention to the case. Little by little, they got more information and the full extent of the affair became clear; not a few hundred, but many thousands, parents were wrongly dealt with harshly by the tax authorities, often resulting in debts of up to tens of thousands of euros, debt restructuring projects and even the relocation of children.

Even after seven years, Gonzálex Perez can still marvel at the whole state of affairs every day. “There is also something new every day. What made me angry the most: the tax authorities who withheld documents in the files at my hearings. That has been demonstrated, and it is actually a mortal sin in administrative law. It was, of course, in a work instruction from the tax authorities: we do not send complete files to court. For example, surveillance reports were not added to the file when it came to lawfulness investigations, or if the word “investigation” appeared in the report. Isn't that incredible? Who are they to extract something from the file, to determine what the judge sees? If I see that someone thinks they are above the law, I explode.”

Motives

Certainly, anger from her strong sense of justice is an important motive. But what means that she has been able to throw herself into this cause with so much energy and dedication every day for years? How does she hold herself up? These are questions that Gonzalex Perez needs to consider. “In part, it's the law itself that gives me energy; that's where my feeling lies. I can switch off my own emotions quite easily. If someone is crying in front of me, I'm the one who has to be strong, the one who says, 'it will take time, but by law, you're right and we'll go for it'.”

It also helps enormously that she gradually had no longer to bear 'the burden' of the benefits affair alone. “The Ombudsman got involved, the Data Protection Authority eventually investigated — although this did not come naturally — and politicians Pieter Omtzigt, Renske Leijten and Farid Azarkan continued to draw attention to it. And think of someone at the tax authorities who ended up giving us the documents that were withheld in the files, or the journalists from RTL and Trouw who kept coming up with revelations... It was a long quest to find supporters, but in the end, many people participated. I am very thankful for that. These people give me the strength to fight over and over again. And the small successes that we have achieved are also ropes that I was always able to hold onto. I'm not levelling myself out, but if MPs, journalists and that conscientious tax officer hadn't focused on it, thousands of parents would still have been in debt restructuring.”

Countless studies

As you know, the consequences of the childcare allowance affair are still raging, even from a constitutional point of view. The Rutte III cabinet fell in mid-January 2021 after the debate about the conclusions reached by the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Childcare Allowance (POK) at the end of 2020: the parents involved had been wronged and the principles of the rule of law were violated. The Council of State and administrative judges indicated that they would look back on this, they wanted to reflect on their own role and would “sort through the whole cabinet of rulings” to see whether decisions were made too linear, such as afterwards in numerous tax cases.

The Data Protection Authority is still investigating the so-called FSV lists (Fraud Signaling Facility, ed.), or the secret “black lists” where allegedly fraudulent parents were placed on. “The tax authorities selected by second nationality, which was in forms next to the BSN, really crazy,” says Gonzálex Pérez. “I especially want to know why people were put on these lists and why they were suspected without their own knowledge. I've been asking that since 2016.”

In addition, after the Pok's findings, the House of Representatives announced a parliamentary survey. And then there is also the European Venice Commission, which is examining the legal protection of Dutch citizens — especially in administrative law — which recently issued recommendations to the Dutch State.

In the meantime, Gonzálex Pérez will be able to guide her clients through numerous committees in the near future, such as the Commission for Actual Injury, the Appeals Advisory Committee and the Compensation and Recovery Committee. They have already received back the amounts that her clients had to unfairly repay, plus an additional 25% and 500 euros every six months that they had to wait. Meanwhile, she is still being called “ten to twenty times a day” pleading for help. “I really have to say no, I can't help everyone,” says Gonzálex Pérez. Her gaze reveals that she finds it difficult to say no. “The Legal Aid Council has put together a pool of 220 lawyers who are ready to help other victims.”

Still a lot of questions

Despite the seven years that the affair has been going on now, the lawyer is far from tired of this case of her life. “Quite the contrary; it may sound crazy, but despite the seriousness, I only like it more as a lawyer. The further you get, the deeper you go into the file and the more you learn, the more interesting it becomes. So many authorities have become involved, and there are still so many uncertainties that interest me and questions that I haven't been getting answers to for years. At the tax authorities, they hate that I ask a lot of questions, but I keep asking: Why did this happen? Why have people been blacklisted? In my view, there has been clear discrimination; the report of the Data Protection Authority in July 2020 clearly established that.”

Ultimately, the mentioned (political) consequences for her are only an afterthought, she says. “A fallen cabinet or criticism of the Council of State, that was never the approach. I and my clients are still dealing with certain people in senior positions at the tax authorities. They partly caused this suffering and are still in place, or have even been promoted. I now mainly work with the performers there, and by far most of them have their hearts in the right place. A small group of people are ruining it, but they are in important positions. They're not supposed to be there.”

Access to justice

Certainly, Gonzalex Perez welcomes the appreciation expressed by the Access to Justice Golden Hourglass. However, she has her reservations when it comes to access to justice in general. “My clients actually didn't have that access to law. They should have had that access even without me. And when you see how the Legal Aid Council and Minister for Legal Protection acted; in their objection phase, the parents were not even able to get assistance from a lawyer. Minister Dekker says that there is really no need to litigate against the government, because you should work it out among yourselves. That theory is wrong in practice.”

She is therefore not in a positive mood about access to justice for the less fortunate in the Netherlands. “A Minister for Legal Protection must ensure that access, but that is currently hard to find. When you also see how hard social lawyers have to work for little money, it's sometimes almost inhuman. It is not without reason that more and more are stopping. Apparently, the vision is that social lawyers should be “cheap”. They receive too few credits for their human approach towards the less wealthy. That bothers me and should be discussed much more.”

Fortunately, quitting as a lawyer is something Gonzálex Perez doesn't think about at all. She certainly has no political ambitions as a result of the affair. “I'm a lawyer at heart.” And should such a case ever arise again, which she might suspect could “get very big”? The answer is easy to guess. “I would do it again in no time. The way I do this thing, I do everything.”This interview took place in September 2021, before numerous new research reports were published in October. The article previously appeared in the latest issue of Advocacy Magazine.

This interview took place in September 2021, before numerous new research reports were published in October. The article previously appeared in the latest issue of Advocacy Magazine.