61–70 of 197 posts
Once upon a time I made the mistake of incorporating a startup in the Netherlands. Never. Again.
> 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.
Can't agree with this. Even if it was just feeding a list to human investigators, who fairly investigated each case, there's still the significant issue of how the list is determined. For example, the tax authority in your country right now catches a small portion of overall fraud. I give them a list of "hot leads" of fraudsters that's really just a list of all the ethnic minorities I hate. Obviously, even if they fa…
Many companies do things like black hole traffic from Russia, Nigeria, China, etc, or make interactions higher friction (require MFA always, etc). Those tactics work and minimally impact real customers.
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…
turned out that in the period 2007-2013, 805 Bulgarians
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't agree with this. Even if it was just feeding a list to human investigators, who fairly investigated each case, there's still the significant issue of how the list is determined. For example, the tax authority in your country right now catches a small portion of overall fraud. I give them a list of "hot leads" of fraudsters that's really just a list of all the ethnic minorities I hate. Obviously, even if they fa…
Whilst you are right in general that biased algorithms are bad even when people using them are good, the problem in _this_ scandal was the the people using the algorithm were trigger-happy, and partially so in a biased way.
>Having dual nationality was marked as a big risk indicator, as was a low income.
Again, even if these cases were all impartially investigated, you're still explicitly targeting low-income people and dual-nationals, probably significantly more likely to be an ethnic minority. I think the algorithm is a worthwhile story, not just the trigger-happy authorities.
> "An audit showed that the tax authorities focused on people with “a non-Western appearance,” while having Turkish or Moroccan nationality was a particular focus". This has nothing to do with algorithms, mates. It had to do with how it wasn't tested and monitored. It appears that it was just rolled out live. > "Fraud prediction and predictive policing based on profiling should just be banned" And here are the usual…
Earlier 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…
> Why do people need to receive hundreds of thousands of Euros for children daycare? It's not about "daycare", it is about assisting families in the (massive) expenses that raising a child incurs. Why? Because unlike the American pension system which is mostly backed by the stock market, European pension systems depend on young and healthy workers to pay the pensions of the current pensioner generation. Obviously thi…
Anything else is just an excuse to get higher budgets and grift.
> The Dutch tax authorities now face a new €3.7 million fine from the country's privacy regulator. How does this work? Wouldn't the government be fining the government and paying itself with the citizens tax revenues? Also, this doesn't seem to serve as a warning at all. Unless all the politicians and civil servants were removed from their job, barred from public positions and given hefty fines then this is actually…
It is part of the theatre, unelected government officials waste taxpayers money on something illegal so they have to pay with taxpayer money for it. The only real punishment would have been is jail time for the people involved and explaining to the rest of the unelected government officials that they can end up in jail. Just like how the rest of society works.
Earlier 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.
Earlier 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…
> Why do people need to receive hundreds of thousands of Euros for children daycare? It's not about "daycare", it is about assisting families in the (massive) expenses that raising a child incurs. Why? Because unlike the American pension system which is mostly backed by the stock market, European pension systems depend on young and healthy workers to pay the pensions of the current pensioner generation. Obviously thi…
On of the examples in a mother with 3 children who had to pay back a hundred thousand Euro that were classified as wrongly received benefits. That means she received tens of thousands of Euros per year! What an insane burden to put on mother.
If something goes wrong the consequences are gigantic. Just like it happened in this scandal.