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Allowance lawyers discontinue consultations with Recovery of Allowances

The Working Group on Benefits Lawyers withdraws from the monthly work meeting with the Implementation Organization for the Recovery of Allowances (UHT). The news that the tax authorities and politicians had had data since October of people who may have wrongly signed up as victims of the benefits affair while the lawyers knew nothing about it “has gone down the wrong throat.”

Editors 26-03-25, 18:15 Last updated: 26-03-25, 18:42

That's what lawyer and chairman Khadija Bozia says. Mutual trust has been so damaged that the lawyers do not want to continue talking now.

Parliamentary debate

The lawyers “never saw” the documents containing potentially wrongly identified victims. That is why Bozia immediately suspended the talks during such a meeting on Wednesday morning. The Working Group says that the timing of the news “cannot be a coincidence”, one day before “an important Parliamentary debate”.

This would “once again focus on the fact that UHT does not function properly as an implementing organization”, but Bozia is afraid that this news will distract attention from that.

Old way

In addition, the Council of State issued a ruling on Wednesday morning giving the UHT an additional sixty weeks to deal with objections if victims believe they are receiving too little financial compensation. The recovery operation is stalled due to increased turnaround times at the service.

“We see that the organization is not functioning”, says Bozia, and with this statement “it seems like they have the space to continue in the old way”.

Bozia also calls the timing of the RVS ruling “remarkable”. Nevertheless, the Working Group hopes that the debate on Thursday “can simply be about designing solutions to recovery surgery bottlenecks”.

A UHT spokesperson states that there was no malicious intent in not sharing the found data with the lawyers. ,, For us, it is important to first thoroughly analyze what the data means exactly and what that means. In fact, that is also important for the allowance parents; we do not want to cause unrest.”

According to the spokesperson, this analysis still needs “some time”. “As soon as we are out, we will discuss that properly with the lawyers.”