Netherlands: Government resigns over welfare scandal
The Dutch state has mercilessly persecuted some of its poorest citizens, said Marcel ten Hooven in De Groene Amsterdammer. A new parliamentary report, titled “Unprecedented Injustice,” details how over the past eight years Dutch tax officials wrongly accused more than 26,000 parents of fraudulently claiming child welfare benefits to which they were, in fact, entitled. In some cases, a missing signature on a single document was all it took to ignite the wrath of tax officials, who branded parents criminals, slapped them with fines, and demanded they immediately repay tens of thousands of euros in benefits. Some families became homeless as a result of the persecution; others shattered under the strain. One now divorced father of two said authorities seized his refrigerator and his car and then garnished 40 percent of his salary. “In all its guises—as legislator, enforcer, and judge—the state abandoned” the people who most needed its protection. Whistleblowers in the tax agency told higher-ups about these “innocent victims,” yet the campaign continued. The committee that drew up the report said that as its members discovered more and more appalling tales of injustice, they reacted with “astonishment and then deep indignation.”
Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his entire cabinet resigned last week over the scandal, said Theodor Holman in Het Parool, but don’t be fooled into thinking that is a fitting punishment. Yes, Rutte admitted culpability, saying that his center-right government was taking “full responsibility” for the injustice and that each affected family will receive about $37,000 in compensation.
But he only did so after opposition Labor Party leader Lodewijk Asscher, a former social affairs minister who oversaw the early stages of the welfare crackdown, shamed him by resigning first. And anyway, given that we are in the midst of a pandemic and only two months away from a scheduled election, the current government is going to stay on in a “caretaker” role. So nothing really changes: Rutte has simply been “put in the corner by the teacher.” His People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy is still on track to win the March elections, meaning Rutte will likely serve a fourth term as prime minister, said Johan Fretz, also in Het Parool. Neither he nor anyone in his government gives the impression that they know they “failed morally.” If voters re-elect Rutte, we will all be just as culpable.
To truly make amends, said Pieter Anko de Vries in Friesch Dagblad, we must uncover how it happened that Dutch citizens with “foreign-sounding surnames” were singled out for the strictest scrutiny. In one instance, a woman of Turkish descent lost her house, car, and business. In another, a mother of three with an Arabic name was evicted and her possessions were confiscated. For many of these families, the $37,000 the government is offering doesn’t begin to cover even their material losses, much less their trauma. The “trust between government and citizens” has been broken. If we are to repair it, we must determine exactly how racist our tax-auditing policy was—and who designed it to be that way.