Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms

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 over this and - surprise - the exact same players were re-elected without taking any responsibility for any of this.

By 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, which tracked both credible and unsubstantiated “signals” of potential fraud. Citizens had no way of finding out why they were on the list or defending themselves.

>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. Being on the blacklist also led to a higher risk score in the child care benefits system.

> That’s not good enough, argues Renske Leijten, a Socialist member of the Dutch parliament

Exactly, and especially in the public sector on the EU level this could be even vastly more damaging. The warning were loud enough and people didn't listen or care, so it is probably necessary that many will have to feel it before anything will change. This is probably too small scale, even if thousands are affected.

Nadine Dorries (UK Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) was right, we should simply get rid of algorithms. They are clearly harmful /s

[0] - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nadine-dorries-micros...

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 architect).

Sadly, I hear that our own tax authorities have started to use them anyway, but then they have long had this tendency of consider themselves "special", and that laws didn't apply as much to them...