Allowance affair

Research confirms: automatic stamp of fraudster in case of high payment debt

By Roel Schreinemachers·July 6, 2021·Updated: July 6, 2021

RTL News

For years, the tax authorities have automatically labeled people a fraud if they have a high payment debt. This is evident from research by the State Audit Service (ADR). Once you were registered as a fraudster, you were no longer eligible for a payment scheme.

This should never have happened, state secretaries Vijlbrief and Van Huffelen of Finance write in a response. Parents have been disproportionately affected. They call the ADR's conclusions “very serious”. Once you were labeled a fraud, you were no longer eligible for a payment arrangement or debt restructuring. Many allowance parents got into so much financial trouble. In some cases, families even had to sell their homes and were left with sky-high debts. Earlier it became clear that in the vast majority of cases there was no fraud at all.

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Tax Office Memo: 3,000 euro debt was an automatic fraud stamp

900 parents

At the end of last year, a 2016 memo from the tax authorities surfaced describing the method. In case of recoveries of more than 3,000 euros — as the document states — allowance parents automatically receive the stamp “intention/gross negligence”. It was unclear whether the memo had also been carried out. The ADR investigation shows that this did indeed happen. At the beginning of 2016, more than 900 parents received the stamp of fraud because they had a childcare debt of more than 3,000 euros or a total allowance debt of more than 5,000 euros.

Eliminate backlogs

The tax authorities did this to eliminate work arrears. A higher threshold was later applied, but in the event of a high payment debt, you could still get the “intention/gross negligence” stamp without further investigation. The ADR has not been able to find out how many people in total were affected by this method. Too little has been laid down for this by the tax authorities.

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Chamber: settlement of the allowance affair must be faster and simpler