If I calculate correctly, Dutch child care allowance is around $2000 per month, which seems generous. What is the average child care allowance in other EU countries?
Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
131–140 of 197 posts
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is mostly a failure of our citizens deciding not to hold the current coalition accountable and still voting for them. There are some wider 'failure of democracy' reasons for this, but in the end I lay the blame at the feet of people who voted for the current government.
People vote because of a combination of issues. Perhaps the main opposition parties also merit punishment-by-not-voting for other actions. My point is that one cannot lay the responsibility in a once-per-4-years parliament seat assignment.
I blame people who did not weigh this problem heavy enough in their decisions.
I also personally blame people who voted VVD and CDA in general, but that is a wider and more personal judgement.
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#133This scandal and the issues at the dutch tax office runs much deeper than just this one set of issues, they also maintained illegal lists of 'potential fraudulent people' on which 100's of thousands of people that had done nothing wrong, such as having the 'wrong' surname. It's rotten to the core and to date there have been zero consequences for the perps and the damage continues to pile up. Our government has fallen…
On the other hand one of the main triggers for this whole operation was the mass fraud by people from Bulgaria who netted a lot of benefits by gaming the system. They traveled to the Netherlands, applied for benefits and then went back to Bulgaria and used Dutch bank accounts and debit cards to get the cash. The tax office never wanted that to happen again and started this program to find fraudsters but ended up clas…
Perhaps the problem is setting the wrong incentives. The way to deter fraud is not necessarily to make the benefits administration overly strict but to directly dis-incetivize fraud through stiff penalties. For instace if benefits fraud had a penalty of say 10 to 20 years imprisonment if convicted, the number of people trying to commit fraud would very likely go dramatically down.
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been trotted out many times before in defense of the tax office's behavior but it doesn't hold water: far more people were affected than Bulgarian fraudsters and besides that compared to the fraud committed by the well-off portion of NL the fraud committed by the poorer part is negligible. But guess who is better at defending themselves against unfair behavior by the authorities.
This is not a defense of the tax office, but it is the cause. The 'bulgaren-fraude' was the cause for the government to change policy (and I believe law) to be much stricter on fraud and be much more vigilant when trying to detect fraud. The current scandal is one of the end results here. An interesting intermediary result is that the culture at the tax-office changed to be much more about 'getting the fraudsters' an…
> The 'bulgaren-fraude' was the cause
No. It wasn't a cause, it was an excuse.
Even back then, politicians warned that by cranking down on the relative few "frauding Bulgarians" a lot of collatoral damage was imminent. A politician even refused to implement it because of this and resigned.
It was predicted to have this collatoral damage. I was publicly known that such fraud would be hard to fight at all, even if collatoral damage was accepted. And still, government wanted to appear tough so proceeded anyway.
It was a choice. Not a force of hand.
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#135> Having dual nationality was marked as a big risk indicator Dual nationality indeed has its ups and downs. FWIW, our children have dual nationality, and on top of that, are all bilingual. On enrolling them in their first school the school insisted on tweaking the enrollment data we'd submitted to list the locally-spoken language second, and so put the non-local language first, as "mother tongue" (and yes, that's exa…
How would they now? By no means those dual nationalities are centrally managed. And therw is no obligation to state a second cotizenship on any papers. Disclaimer: Dual citizenship kids in Europe.
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#136This really isn't about "algorithms", so much as it is about xenophobia and ethnic discrimination. The "algorithm", is just another plausible deniability cover for institutionalized discrimination against various minorities and the poor who are least able to fight back.
Those in charge, know exactly what they are doing when they create their "blacklists" and "targets". They know the names, they have the bias and prejudices, and they want to target those minority groups. The poorer and less able to fight back, the better. They know the type of damage they are doing to those peoples lives, and sadistically enjoy inflicting it.
It's only when they get caught, do they start running around and pulling out excuses from their orifices, and "it was the algorithm" is just one of them.
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand one of the main triggers for this whole operation was the mass fraud by people from Bulgaria who netted a lot of benefits by gaming the system. They traveled to the Netherlands, applied for benefits and then went back to Bulgaria and used Dutch bank accounts and debit cards to get the cash. The tax office never wanted that to happen again and started this program to find fraudsters but ended up clas…
> If you let less money circulate the system trough taxes and benefits less can go wrong. Bonus: less can go wrong administratively too. Case in point: ever since the Dutch tax office had to also give out these kinds of wellfare/assistance funds, things have been a wreck at the tax office. It's been over a decade and it's no longer even their most important thing to fix...
Or maybe the Tax office isn't equipped to hand out money.
I'm not joking here, but an office that has been focused on extracting money for literally centuries, with a strong emphasis on detecting fraudsters and sticking to laws and rules, doesn't have the culture to handle allowences for people in need.
The latter is a very human function. With lots of interpretations. The former is a very strict and rigid function.
which is why previously the latter was done by local authorities, often they even did it through proxies in the neighborhoods: something done by people, close to the people.
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#138By reading, seems that the algorithm is just a scapegoat used in the title. This is racial discriminations dating way back, purposely introduced in the algorithm, and supported for 6 years. > Having dual nationality was marked as a big risk indicator, as was a low income. >In 2020, Trouw and another Dutch news outlet, RTL Nieuws revealed that the tax authorities also kept secret blacklists of people for two decades,…
People across the government-corporate spectrum are now fully aware that if they train 'self-learning algorithms' on biased data sets then those algorithms will adopt those biases. Such people seem to believe they can then get away with blaming the algorithm for the outcome while avoiding any legal responsibility themselves. On the positive side more and more people are generally aware of how this works. Criminal inv…
> People across the government-corporate spectrum are now fully aware that if they train 'self-learning algorithms' on biased data sets then those algorithms will adopt those biases.
"Bias laundering" is how it's usually called. Take biased training data, put it in "the algorithm", and presto it's all legal because it comes from "the algorithm".
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Corruption is a form of dishonesty or a criminal offense which is undertaken by a person or an organization which is entrusted with a position of authority, in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's personal gain." I use corruption in the dictionary definition sense. I guess you think that corruption only means bribery.
> […] in order to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for one's personal gain. There was no personal gain nor illicit benefits gained by the civil servants responsible. For something to be corruption, the perpetrator has to gain something.
You think that they did this because they are purely evil? I think they had to gain something. Maybe the gain was less work.
Re: Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been trotted out many times before in defense of the tax office's behavior but it doesn't hold water: far more people were affected than Bulgarian fraudsters and besides that compared to the fraud committed by the well-off portion of NL the fraud committed by the poorer part is negligible. But guess who is better at defending themselves against unfair behavior by the authorities.
This is not a defense of the tax office, but it is the cause. The 'bulgaren-fraude' was the cause for the government to change policy (and I believe law) to be much stricter on fraud and be much more vigilant when trying to detect fraud. The current scandal is one of the end results here. An interesting intermediary result is that the culture at the tax-office changed to be much more about 'getting the fraudsters' an…
The tax office has a long history of (privacy) abuse, law breaking, and going after after the "little" people with no way to defend themselves.
Some of the not-so-savory/unlawful recent abuses I recall: - Going after "all" the rent allowance fraudsters that were, according to them, undermining and abusing the system.. Result: recovery effort dropped after it turned out the cost of running the fraud task force was an order of magnitude higher than what was recovered from the people defrauding the system.. - Illegally storing and going through millions of traffic camera images to go after fraudsters driving a few kilometres more than they declared. Result: stopped by the supreme court, on ground of unlawful privacy abuse. - Cross governmental agencies checks & cross database checks of different expenditures (heating, rent, telephone bills, online shopping etc) to make sure that some low-income families were not earning more than declared. Also declared unlawful.
The theme is recurrent: an abuse of power, and a propensity to break the law to extort money from lower class incomes mostly, as they are the least capable of pushing back.
The motives are unclear, but, fundamentally, the problem originates in a political will and ingrained mentality of distrust of their fellow citizens -especially the poor- and blaming them for not contributing to the taxation effort. Very ironic coming from a fiscal paradise. Even more ironic when you know that, until recently, Shell could write-off world-wide expenses as local loses, and thereby not pay taxes in the Netherlands. Well, Shell left for London, so at least that problem is solved.