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Allowances scandal

In a draft report, a committee declared lawyer Eva Gonzálex Pérez's complaints against the CAF team unfounded.

• • Authors
    • Derk Stokmans
    • Stefan Vermeulen
  • Published onMay 21, 2024

Attorney Eva Gonzálex Pérez's complaints against two tax employees for careless, biased actions and abuse of powers are unfounded. This is stated in a confidential draft report by an independent committee that investigated these complaints on behalf of the Ministry of Finance.Attorney Gonzálex Pérez played a crucial role in the coming out of the Benefits scandal, where the tax authorities wrongly stopped and reclaimed childcare benefits from thousands of parents. As a result, those parents ran into major financial and personal problems. Gonzálex Pérez challenged to the Council of State how the tax authorities had treated customers of the Eindhoven childcare agency Dadim, owned by her husband. She won that case in March 2017.

Signs of fraud

Gonzálex Pérez's complaints, which she also filed on behalf of some of the parents involved and the childminding agency, concerned two employees of the so-called Combiteam Approach Facilitators. This CAF team was part of the tax authorities with around thirty employees, set up in 2013 to investigate signs of fraud. Stopping the allowances for around three hundred families at childminding agency Dadim became known as the CAF-11 case, and shaped it starting signal for the Allowance scandal. For years, the outside world assumed that the CAF team initiated this withdrawal.

But in the draft report, the complaints committee describes how the CAF team shared “surprising points” from a book investigation at Dadim with the Tax Administration's Department of Benefits. The CAF employees were not involved in stopping the surcharges from customers of the childcare agency, the draft report states: “In their capacity as CAF team members, they only reported their findings to Surcharges and were hardly aware of the further processing by Allowances and the fact that parental allowances were stopped.”

The draft report has never become public before because Gonzálex Pérez withdrew her complaint in 2022. The external committee's investigation was almost complete by then. Gonzálex is now seeking disclosure of the draft report by Finance to court. to stop. The members of the CAF team have been trying to get the report out for years because they suspect it contains exculpatory information for them.In response to a request from NRC To respond to the draft report, Gonzálex Pérez said in writing that she withdrew her complaint due to “the Commission's not impartial approach”, which did not comply with its request to be interviewed at the same time as the CAF team staff. She calls it “remarkable” that the committee did draw up a draft report because, after the withdrawal of its complaints, there was no legal basis for this. In addition, she says, the concept is “one-sided” because it came about without her adversarial. The complaint that Gonzálex Pérez filed against the two members of the CAF team concerns how these employees carried out the book investigation at Dadim in May 2014. According to Gonzálex Pérez, the CAF employees were biased during their investigation, did not comply with the Audit Handbook from the tax authorities and they falsely accused the childminder agency and involved parents of fraud with benefits. The external committee that investigated the complaints finds otherwise. According to the complaints committee, the CAF employees did not abuse their powers during the investigation. Nor was there (intentional) deception or did the officials act biased or careless. “My client will like these conclusions, because they were portrayed as a bunch of crooks up to the House of Representatives,” says Jacob Geuze, lawyer for one of the involved members of the CAF team. “We had a vague idea of what would be in the draft report, but we didn't know its contents. That's why we've been trying to get that report out the table for so long.” In an earlier procedure, the Ministry of Finance released the draft report, but then the content was completely removed.

Tough approach

Partly because the Benefits scandal came into the public eye via the so-called CAF-11 case, politicians and journalists quickly described the merciless approach to parents who made mistakes in applying for childcare benefits as the “CAF approach”. This was also done by politicians themselves, who by a large majority had chosen that tough approach, such as, for example Prime Minister Mark Rutte. CAF, and thus the CAF team, became a symbol of the merciless approach taken by allowance parents.CAF team employees have always said that they were not responsible for the careless cessation of childcare benefits. According to them, that authority lay with the Tax Administration's Department of Charges, including consulting firm KPMG. concluded last summer, in a report that the CAF team transmitted signals it encountered during its investigations to others within the tax authorities, who then decided what happened to them. Although KPMG also wrote that when collecting and processing information, the team had the “explicit task [to] push the boundaries”. According to the team itself, although those limits were pushed, they were not exceeded, KPMG wrote. The CAF team thus formed a link in the merciless approach to fraud that could ultimately lead to unfairly adverse consequences for citizens.Attorney Gonzálex Pérez withdrew her complaint against the CAF employees involved in March 2022. The external committee that investigated the complaint then shared the draft report with Finance because it according to the ministry “was in fact finished, and no longer the subject of mutual discussion within the committee”. Outgoing Finance Minister Steven van Weyenberg (D66) decided to make the draft report public last month after the CAF employees involved had requested it by invoking the Open Government Act. Gonzálex Pérez opposes the publication of the play, partly because, according to her, it would contain “emotional statements” and “personal circumstances”. A date has not yet been scheduled for summary proceedings filed by her with the Oost-Brabant District Court. Finance does not want to respond to questions because KPMG is still investigating how the CAF team works on behalf of the ministry.

A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 22, 2024.

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