Long waiting period and increasingly stringent judgements: criticism of dealing with immaterial damage, benefits affair

1. 04-03-2023 16:06
2. Inland
3. Author: Leonie van Noort

A support event for affected parents in the allowance affair
Source: ANP
If their case has been reviewed and they disagree with the amount awarded, victims of the benefits affair can apply to the Actual Damage Commission. But that committee is not working properly, they and their lawyers say.
Kristie Rongen is one of the victims who is having problems with the committee. Rongen became national fame when, in an election debate at RTL, she critically asked Prime Minister Rutte about the benefits affair.
Immaterial damage
She herself had an unjustified payment debt of 92 thousand euros. She submitted an application to the Actual Damage Commission, but it has been on the shelf there since 2021.
In the case of Kristie - and in many other cases - the committee is about compensation for non-material damage. This is, for example, emotional damage caused by long-term stress. Unjustified and sometimes sky-high claims by the tax authorities, hardly any possibility to appeal against them, years of money worries and, in the long run, emotional exhaustion, are among other things what the victims went through.
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Disadvantaged and unemployed
That also had an effect on their children, says Kristie. For example, her children have fallen behind in learning: “Partly because of this, they were unable to attend studies.” She lost her job herself. Her contract was not renewed, partly because she was “too much in the media” due to the benefits affair.
Compensation for non-material damage is very important to Kristie, but she has been waiting for a decision by the Actual Damage Commission since 2021.
INFO
People who wrongly had to repay childcare allowance can apply to the tax authorities for recovery. The Department of Implementation Organization for the Recovery of Allowances (UHT) will then work on that. Because it is sometimes difficult to determine the damage exactly, there is another committee that victims can go to if they disagree with the compensation amount awarded: the Actual Damage Commission.

More than 1,200 people registered there and only a quarter of the cases have been dealt with. This often involves immaterial damage, such as emotional damage to parents and children.
Barriers for lawyers
Lawyers, meanwhile, indicate that they are not always able to assist their clients as they would like. “We don't get all the information from the tax authorities, the underlying documents don't come to us. Sometimes even arguing that it would take too much time to send them and that it would not benefit the victim. ', says lawyer Touria Khidous, who assists various victims.
In addition, immaterial damage is typically something that personal injury experts know a lot about. Most lawyers who assist benefit parents, on the other hand, do not specialize in this. They have to hire expertise for that and there is no financial room for that.
Unclear testing
Touria Khidous also faces another problem in seeking compensation for its clients, namely the unclear assessment of non-material damage. “The requirement was always that we must make that plausible. For example, making it plausible that loss of a job or a divorce is the result of the impact of the unfair tax debts.”
However, it increasingly seems that the Commission on Actual Injury also wants to see real evidence, and is therefore becoming increasingly stringent. “So not only make it plausible, but also really prove it. That is almost impossible to do with immaterial damage.”
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Fundamental error
According to SP MP Renske Leijten, the Actual Damage Commission is only part of the problem. According to her, the fact that the processing of the damage has come to an organization that is closely linked to the tax authorities (the so-called Implementation Organization for Recovery of Surcharges) was a fundamental mistake.
She also thinks that of setting up various procedures and counters. “People are now bogged down in endless procedures that only get more expensive as time goes by. You have to organize it quite differently.”
One-day review
Leijten suggests organizing an assessment in one day for all victims who have come forward. “Everyone then sits down, lawyers, clients, personal injury experts, and that is then assessed by an independent party.”
“The tax authorities provide the files and all the necessary information, but not the opinion.”

Date

15 July 2023

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