The Dutch government will decide on Friday to drop a growing scandal in which tax officials have wrongly accused thousands of parents of fraud, throwing many families into debt, ordering them to repay childcare allowances.
The opposition leader of the Labor Party, Lodewijk Asscher, who was Minister of Social Affairs in the previous government, resigned on Thursday for the deal, denying that he knows that the tax authority “wrongly hunts thousands of families”, but the recognition of a faulty system “has made the government an enemy of its people”.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte has said he opposes the dissolution of the current coalition, saying the Netherlands needs stability amid the coronavirus pandemic, but has not ruled it out. The cabinet will review its position at a regular meeting on Friday.
The four ruling parties in Rutte’s coalition are deeply divided in their response to a cursed report on the scandal, but are believed to prefer to end their alliance rather than risk losing a vote of confidence next Tuesday, following a planned parliamentary debate on the report. .
The MPs’ report, entitled Unprecedented Injustice, was published last month following an investigation into the childcare benefits scandal, which included public questioning of officials up to and including Rutte.
He ruled that “the fundamental principles of the rule of law had been violated” by the Dutch tax authority, with family fraud investigations triggered by “something as simple as an administrative error, with no malicious intent”.
The chairman of the commission of inquiry, Chris van Dam, called the system “a mass trial in which there was no room for nuances”, with more than 20,000 working families prosecuted for fraud in court, ordered the reimbursement of child support and refused the right to appeal for several years from 2012.
Some were pushed close to bankruptcy or forced to move out of the house through unfair claims for tens of thousands of euros, when the alleged fraud amounted to an incorrectly completed form or a missing signature. Several couples separated under tension.
Government ministers, MPs, civil servants and court judges have all taken their share of responsibility, the report concluded, recommending “everyone in the state apparatus to ask how such a thing can be prevented from happening again”.
The government apologized for the tax methods and, in March last year, set aside more than 500 million euros (£ 450 million) in compensation, about 30,000 euros for each family.
Following racial allegations, the tax authority also admitted that 11,000 dual-national families were selected for special control. However, Dutch prosecutors refused to open an investigation into possible discrimination, saying they had found no evidence of a crime.
“The responsibility for the guilty acts attributed to the state must be sought in the political field and not in criminal law,” public prosecutors said last week.
Twenty of the families involved this week have taken legal action against ministers in three parts of Rutte’s current coalition for their role in the scandal, accusing them of criminal negligence through failure of good governance, discrimination and violation of children’s rights.
The Minister of Health, Tamara van Ark, the Minister of Finance, Wopke Hoekstra, the Minister of Economic Affairs, Eric Wiebes, the former Minister of Taxation Menno Snel – as well as Asscher – are named in the case documents, filed in the Dutch Supreme Court.
The fate of the government is largely in the hands of Rutte’s coalition partners, with at least one leader – Sigrid Kaag of the D66 social-liberal party – saying this week that the political consequences of the parliamentary report are inevitable.
If it collapses, the government will remain in office until a new coalition is formed, with general elections set to take place in March and Rutte and his center-right Party for Freedom and Democracy behaving strongly in the polls.