> corruption has enabled these companies to construct confusing and elaborate ways of avoiding their fair share of taxes. I'm not sure one can consider it corruption, per se, rather it's tax competition on the part of smaller EU states. To my mind, it's not that the countries are being bribed by companies, rather that the laws attract a (far too small proportion of) global/EU revenue to be taxed in their country.
The Dutch allow companies to negotiate individual rates which are kept secret. No, this is not competition, it is corruption.
Economic agency is not corruption. It's no different from negotiating tax breaks with local governments here in the United States.
I hate how the correlation between income/country of origin and fraud probability is discarded as „racist“ by at least Amnesty International. Maybe we should first do a correlation and causality analysis and see what it yields instead of closing our eyes because of PC?
So what could cause a causality between income/country of origin and fraud probability?
Is fraud genetic?
I don't think so, so it's only a correlation at most.
The only reason it isn't an "algorithm" is because no one thought to use that language when it was created. All "algorithm" means is "a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations"- computers don't need to be involved, nor does "AI". The no-fly list is a process of looking up people in a list of names when calculating whether they can fly. That fits the definition as much as anything else the media calls a…
Honestly, as someone most of whose life is spent writing algorithms, when I hear any non-technical person say the word "algorithm" that's my cue to tune out. "Algorithms" seems to have a meaning that's approximately "super-intelligent runaway AI robots ... oh, and they're also racist".
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…
I'm sure this happened, but this is where the checks and balances come in; there were apparently no checks to see if the people actually lived and worked in NL. And there was no recourse to get the money back, which is a failing of European law and the fraudster's country of origin's legal branches.
And the fix was to cast too wide a net; instead of handling the individual cases, they instead tried to apply logic and rules to it; if (country == bulgaria) fraudPotential += 100 kinda thing.
> 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…
I think you misunderstood me. I am not saying they don't deserve support. I am saying that the government can support people in a way that is not so bureaucratic. Pay the institutions like schools, daycare, etc directly and don't burden the parents with requesting benefits and sending around enormous amounts of money. The institutions can apply for government money for each child they have to take care of. And the pa…
This is why I really dislike social solutions that involves money. I understand that you have no choice but to use money in a developed economy (because if you just give services, it doesn't count toward GDP), but this is peak 'indicator became the target' dumbassery.
Around here we have a law where any decision taken by the public sector with the help of a computer program must (upon request) be explained in plain language, the calculations detailed step by step. Of course, this indirectly prohibits the use of the kind of programs that seem to have been used in this case, since instead of an algorithm, they use a neural network which is a black box even to his trainer (or archite…
The only reason it isn't an "algorithm" is because no one thought to use that language when it was created. All "algorithm" means is "a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations"- computers don't need to be involved, nor does "AI". The no-fly list is a process of looking up people in a list of names when calculating whether they can fly. That fits the definition as much as anything else the media calls a…
Very true that this just obscures the issue with processing personal data. That of course happens already on large scales for years.
> 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…
I think you misunderstood me. I am not saying they don't deserve support. I am saying that the government can support people in a way that is not so bureaucratic. Pay the institutions like schools, daycare, etc directly and don't burden the parents with requesting benefits and sending around enormous amounts of money. The institutions can apply for government money for each child they have to take care of. And the pa…
There are a few more reasons that I don't have time to delve into right now. But the main practical reason is that government assistance for daycare is very income dependent, so government paying directly to the daycare would require giving them parental income information, which is a big privacy no-no.
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…
In theory, the Dutch pension system is ALSO backed by the stock market, which is why they will cut down on payments if the stock market isn't doing very well (according to their own calculations). The more I hear about things like that, the more I'm inclined to just handle my own pension fund. But that's where things get tricky, because an employer's pension contributions are tax-free, if they were to be paid out, income tax would be charged on it.
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…
Ironically, this is one of the reasons I like the idea of UBI - you can't defraud the government when they're giving money to everyone. Most of the budget required to detect and enforce fraud vanishes. Secondary effects (and their costs), such as the one presented in this story, go away.
It's not that simple, I know. But spending so much on bureaucratic red tape and fraud prevention is something that feels really silly with our current systems.