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A student can get €100,000 for child care?
That is amazing.
For me, that is the most surprising thing in the entire article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meanwhile, the irony amidst all this is that the Netherlands is the largest tax haven for companies globally. Literally every brand/company you can think of is legally headquartered in NL for tax purposes. Eg: FAANG, Disney, IKEA, Uber, Mars Chocolate, etc etc
Are you sure you’re not mixing up the Netherlands with Ireland?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
> Ireland has the BEPS tools to enable US IP-heavy multinationals to reroute global profits into Ireland, tax-free. The Netherlands then enables these Irish profits to get to a classical tax haven (e.g. the Cayman Islands or Jersey) without incurring EU withholding tax.
I empathise with your the confusion - corruption has enabled these companies to construct confusing and elaborate ways of avoiding their fair share of taxes.
This 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…
This 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…
It seems like bodies of government without accountability have something in common: corruption.
This 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…
It's shocking to read, and reminds me of the British Post Office scandal. A €3.7 million + €2.75 million fines are a slap-on-the wrist for what happened. Even €30,000/case seems a pittance compared to its effects on people. It mentions there were "secret blacklists of people for two decades" and that "authorities [were] hiding information or misleading the parliament about the facts". I don't see how regulating algor…
> Chermaine Leysner’s life changed in 2012, when she received a letter from the Dutch tax authority demanding she pay back her child care allowance going back to 2008. Leysner, then a student studying social work, had three children under the age of 6. The tax bill was over €100,000. A student can get €100,000 for child care? That is amazing. For me, that is the most surprising thing in the entire article.
It is a Dutch documentary, unfortunately without English subtitles:
https://www.2doc.nl/documentaires/series/2doc/2021/alleen-te...
> Authorities penalized families over a mere suspicion of fraud based on the system’s risk indicators This is the real story here. The algorithm is incidental.