Promising plan for faster compensation for allowance parents, with support from Princess Laurentien

Promising plan for faster compensation for allowance parents, with support from Princess Laurentien
Together with Princess Laurentien and a few insurers, allowance parents have developed a new way to deal with the damage caused by the benefits affair. The government wants to take over parts of this to smooth out the stalled processing.
Charlotte Huisman June 2, 2023, 05:00

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The Foundation for the Recovery of Unprecedented Injustice from Affected Parents drew attention to their case at the European Parliament in Brussels this week.Image: Hatim Kaghat/Belga

The alternative approach to dealing with the benefits affair was presented in The Hague at the end of last year, sources around the Ministry of Finance confirm. Whether the proposal will be adopted in its entirety is not yet certain, but some of its elements certainly are. With this method, parents have to provide less evidence and there are fixed standard amounts for each type of damage. On Friday, the Council of Ministers will discuss options to accelerate the recovery operation of the benefits affair.
It was already remarkable that a member of the Royal House was dealing with victims of the politically sensitive benefits affair, but it has never been clear that Princess Laurentien and her Number 5 Foundation are so closely involved in ways to accelerate claims processing. At her request, personal injury specialists from the insurers Aegon and Achmea developed an additional calculation model. The Netherlands Bar Association supports the plan.

Natasja Dipai (34) is one of the allowance parents and children who developed the collective settlement agreement method — as it is called — supported by the Number 5 Foundation. They criticized the way in which the government arranges their damage repairs: extremely slowly and with “enormous suspicion,” she says. “First, the government wrongly identified you as a fraud, and now you have to prove firmly that you are not a fraud”.

Personal life story
With forty other allowance parents, Dipai went through the method on a trial basis. It starts with a long list of questions that help put a factual account on paper: what did their life look like before the tax authorities came to recover the childcare allowance they received, what happened next? How are things now and what do they want in the future? They can write down the answers themselves. Or they do that, like Dipai, with a neutral writer.
Then, calculators put elements from this personal life story — such as losing a job, seizing household effects — into a calculation model with standard amounts. After a few hours, an amount of damage rolled out that they presented to the parent.
In her opinion, the amount determined for Dipai did not cover the damage she had suffered. “No amount of money does that. But it's nice to feel that you're being trusted, acknowledged. You will be explained how the amount is structured. I thought: if possible, I would end it like this, rather than wait years before it's my turn at the Real Injury Committee. '
State Secretary Aukje de Vries (Allowances) also sees that things need to change course: 27 thousand parents were recognized as victims after a light test and received 30 thousand euros, but then things stalled for them. Many will have to wait until at least 2025 to calculate the total amount that was unfairly recovered.
Dealing with the damage caused as a result of the debt burden and associated stress is even more difficult. The Actual Damage Committee responsible for this is unable to do the work. Less than five cases of benefit victims per week are being completed, there are 1,400 applications. The alternative with the individual settlement agreement, which began last year, hardly appears to be going faster.

Unorthodox plans
That is why the Secretary of State is identifying other possible accelerations. Unorthodox plans like Number 5 are now on the table. They were previously seen as legally too risky, say insiders. Moreover, so far, the Secretary of State hardly wanted to know about drastic changes, because she did not want to change the rules of the game during the match. But it is now clear that a change is needed, with the help of external parties.
A major bottleneck in processing is that the government expects parents to demonstrate a causal relationship between the benefits affair and the actual damage suffered per event, such as losing a job, cancelling a study, losing a home. “Providing proof of this so many years later often proves impossible,” says personal injury specialist Marco Speelmans of insurer Aegon. “Also because the consequences of the benefits affair extend over many years.”
Speelmans says that Princess Laurentien, on behalf of the victims, approached him and Achmea's personal injury specialists for advice a few months ago. They noticed that the stories of the allowance parents often contain the same elements, such as losing a job. The experts then created a model free of charge. “Here, life events are the building blocks on which a compensation amount depends, with some differentiation as well.”

Common personal injury practice
Speelmans does not want to mention amounts, but, according to him, they are part of the usual personal injury practice. “If we start from their story, the parents don't have to prove causality, they just have to make it plausible.” The insurers, Speelmans insists, do not participate in the implementation.
The method is based on trust. But what if some parents don't tell their stories honestly? “The loss of your own home and the visit of a bailiff are real,” says Speelmans. “Parents know that random tests are being carried out, to check.”

“It would be so great if the government would trust my story and compensate for my damage,” says Dipai. She noticed how well it did her to have her whole story on paper. “When I read it back for the first time, I thought: gosh, did I go through all this?”

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