Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
politico.euThis 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.
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 classifying a lot of people wrongly. To make it it even more Kafkaesque some of the Bulgarian fraudsters ALSO received the 30k compensation!
One of the recommendations is to stop pumping around so much money. If you let less money circulate the system trough taxes and benefits less can go wrong. Why do people need to receive hundreds of thousands of Euros for children daycare? It makes no sense whatsoever. Let the people keep the money, pay less taxes and pay the daycare centers from the government directly for each child. The bureaucracy is the real problem here.
When parents requested their paperwork they received hundreds of papers with all the real information blacked out. Imagine completely black papers. It was absolutely disgusting and the Dutch government even stepped down because of the whole affair. Amazingly the same political parties got elected again and are now in office in the same coalition as before...
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' and much less about 'helping people'. Throw on a bit of "bureaucrats trying to cover their own and their bosses' ass" when people accidentally get marked for fraud, and you start getting the results we have here.
I fear that this culture (both the citizen as adversary 'getting fraudsters' culture and the ass covering) is still in place, and much more widespread throughout the government. Similar things seem to be happening at the National Mining Institute trying to discredit earthquake damage in Groningen for one example.
<sarcasm> luckily when the government stepped down because of the last scandal, the new government was a big change and a big step towards fixing these attitudes </sarcasm>
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Whatever the stated reason was, they failed horribly at execution - by unfairly stereotyping and discriminating against innocent people.
There lots of other ways to combat tax fraud.
Fully agreed.
But the stated reason is still relevant, if only to check what the history and reasoning of the original plan was. Here it informs us how the tax office came to see citizens as adversaries, when that was not (or less so) their stance before 2016.
> mass fraud by people from Bulgaria
turned out that in the period 2007-2013, 805 Bulgarians
Thank you for pointing that out. I guess I should not have used the mass adjective.
The Bulgarians were very visible, but not the main reason:
https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/artikelen/2021/bu...
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.
Why would the required budget vanish? People are greedy. Why claim UBI for just you when you could claim for your fictitious family of 6?
At least here in the US, even children have tax IDs. I don't think it would vanish completely, but it makes it a much smaller issue when all you have look for double-submitted tax IDs instead of running heuristics.
I think the unique ID system should be fixed (without damaging privacy); we have the technology to fix IDs to identify people and let them ID themselves or do KYC without the current fraude prone and error prone setup. I understand this is a big undertaking, at the start, but in the end, it will be easier for most people, harder or impossible for fraudsters and easier for the government. Indeed having a unique UUID assigned at birth or when moving into the country is a first step and trivial to check for even if it is, in essence, anonymous.
Systems similar to this exist. They’re not (all?) anonymous, however.
Every Swedish citizen and resident has a unique and dedicated number (date of birth followed by four digits), and you can use it in tandem with for example BankID (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID) to authenticate yourself almost everywhere.
It would be extraordinarily hard to make up UBI claims for non-existing family members and receive payouts in Sweden. You would first have to convince the tax agency to register the fake person in order to get a new personal number, either as a newborn or immigrant, which either way is obviously subject to controls. You’d then have to keep this up through various mandatory interactions with government agencies without getting found out. It would probably be much more effort (not to mention stress) than just working for the same money.
How would you manage to register 5 fake family members with the government? Governments already track its citizens in basically every country, it is really hard to trick them into thinking more people than that exists.
It's actually pretty easy in the US.
There are special protections for illegal immigrants so it's reasonably easy to invent a family of them to collect benefits.
In addition, various US govts or even agencies within the same govt, often don't talk to one another.
So, when an old person dies, friends/family can keep collecting benefits.
See https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/mar/16/social-securit...
"Social Security records show that 6.5 million people in the US have reached the ripe old age of 112. In reality, only few could possibly be alive. As of last fall, there were only 42 people known to be that old in the entire world."
It's not just dead people.
"One Social Security number was used 613 times. An additional 194 numbers were used at least 50 times each."
Its more like not registering the departures of family members from this mortal coil, and is a persistent (if relatively small scale) problem with Social Security payments in the States.
Which, one again, circles to the point that the money, time, and effort spent on fighting such low level individual fraud typically vastly out-spends the actual fraud they're trying to combat.
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.
> 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.
> 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 this has the advantage that stock market crashes won't wipe out a whole generation's pensions and that the stock markets are not inflated artificially by enormous amounts of "dumb money" being loaded into anything that promises a profit (which is partially what caused the 2008ff crisis), but it has the disadvantage that society has to really take care of not falling into demographic traps.
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 parents can just go to work and not move around swats of money.
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.
> That means she received tens of thousands of Euros per year!
I'm writing this from memory, so it may be wrong, but as I remember it: parents would receive "modest" support; a much larger part would go directly to the daycare, outside of the parents' view. Now if the daycare was deemed to be illegal/fraud/..., the parents would be on the hook for both the money they received as well as the money the daycare received.
Again, I may be misremembering - but this is definitely one way to put a mom into 100s of thousands of debt that she'd never seen.
The British "tax free childcare" system seems to be setup specifically to make it as hard to deal with as possible. My partner mostly deals with it but essentially you setup a weird bank account through which your childcare provider collects their payment.
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.
> the main practical reason is that government assistance for daycare is very income dependent
They should stop doing that. The wealthy pay more taxes, so refund them as free childcare. If you think the wealthy are getting away with something under a universal entitlement, raise their taxes.
I'm guessing he means have the government pay for all daycare for everyone fully and just pay for it from tax revenue generated by a progressive income tax.
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.
> (because if you just give services, it doesn't count toward GDP)
And considering GDP as the most important metric isn't peak dumbassery ?
Who would give the services if there is no payment? Are you talking about a barter society?
> but it has the disadvantage that society has to really take care of not falling into demographic traps.
Does it? Or is it just that the demographic issues are more readily apparent?
You can't eat the stock market, so you can accumulate as much wealth as you want in stock market-backed pensions plans or otherwise – if by the time you want to retire there aren't enough working-age people left around willing to provide you goods and services, your pension scheme is worth zilch.
> 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.
Using investment returns to pay for retirement is no less dependent on young and healthy workers. Us retirees own the companies, working people work for them, and we skim the returns. It accomplishes the same thing but with less central planning. It's still vulnerable to demographic traps.
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.
The way I deal with this: make a good profit, pay myself a decent salary and the remainder as dividends, invest those in very low risk asset classes myself. It isn't quite as tax efficient as a pension scheme would be but the chance that the money will be there when I need it is about 100%.
>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.
Which IMHO the European pension system is massively flawed as it's basically a Ponzi scheme that requires more and more people to keep the system going, more people that will consume more resources and need more real estate to live in, real-este which governments and banks have turned into a speculation vehicle making them unaffordable for the new generation of young people who are supposed to be many and pay into the system.
The real problem is everyone wants to rely on the current working population, especially the middle class, despite it being evident the middle class is doing progressively worse. You don't need to pump the population numbers year after year if retirees can accept they'll be a little worse off relative to the younger generation compared to their ancestors, for example. Instead, many retirees expect the younger generations to carry the full burden and figure it out on their own.
Add to that several other problems in NL in particular, and you have a recipe for disaster. One of the main reasons people with a median income have huge trouble finding a decent place to live.
> Which IMHO the European pension system is massively flawed as it's basically a Ponzi scheme
flawed, maybe, it is actually been good for people that strted working in the 50s-60s, but a Ponzi scheme?
I don't see the connection.
Most pension systems in Europe are in balance and have no problem paying the pensions, the only real problem is that the population is growing older but people get their first job much later in life and the age of retirement is not advancing at the same rate of the aging of the population.
Many pensions in my country are contributing to the economy of the family, so they are not going into the pockets of some old grumpy grandparent that lives on the shoulders of the younger generations and spend 9 months/year cruising the Mediterranean sea, having breakfast in Venice, lunch in Split and dinner in Crete.
> real-este which governments and banks have turned into a speculation vehicle
real-estate is mostly a cost in Europe, unless you have a shitload of money.
In my current pension plan. If Right now everyone stopped participating, the pension is setup to be able to pay-out all currently outstanding pensions in full. There is of-course some variance in the interest rates attained, and the actuarial factors (how long people live) which mean that in reality this might not be the case. But the Dutch pension system is very much setup to _not_ be a Ponzi scheme. Money I put in is earmarked for me. The only 'collective' situation is that if there is a shortfall some of the money earmarked for me can be used for others. But such shortfalls are rare. Especially because there is 'slack' in the system to catch a shortfall not by touching my money, but by not (fully) compensating inflation.
Sure, but using this logic civilizations themselves are also basically Ponzi schemes.
Its about gathering power to the institutions and bureaucrats that work in them.
Anything else is just an excuse to get higher budgets and grift.
> Let the people keep the money, pay less taxes and pay the daycare centers from the government directly for each child.
But what would all the important middle men do for a living then? /s
Genuine question... is 'people from Bulgaria' a euphemism for Roma gyspies?
No.
You will never get bureaucracy out of Europe anymore, it is a done deal. Worse, surveillance will be extremely expanded with the AI act and police forces will be consolidated. Of course that won't help against criminal cases like this at all. It is truly the old continent by now. Taxes must be so high because the system will leech all that money, such schemes will be just a side note.
Good. Bureaucracy is what protects us from hypercapitalists raping our planet's environment for personal gain. European standards are stricter and produce cleaner everything from food to appliances to cars. Our lives are generally better in every way and for less money sunk, even accounting for supposedly higher taxes.
That is an illusion about the current situation, European politicians have the closest relations to industry and are far easier lobbied than decentral governments and bureaucracy can act as a defense of established actors. Privacy laws are build with contacts from Google and Facebook. Once the relation is established you will never get rid of this anymore.
Exchange some popular issue for access to user data, the same that happened with telephone providers. Just be realistic about it.
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.
I would think "higher chance of getting caught" would be better in deterring any particular crime than "stiff penalties".
My first google search "harsh penalty deter crime" had this as the top:
>Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime. Laws and policies designed to deter crime by focusing mainly on increasing the severity of punishment are ineffective partly because criminals know little about the sanctions for specific crimes.
Are you seriously suggesting a 20 year sentence for benefits fraud?
Ignoring the fact that such a system would be ripe for abuse and retaliatory behavior, just accidentally convicting an innocent person would absolutely ruin their life.
Getting wrongly convicted is already a huge tragedy. Now you'd be handing out life sentences basically.
Let's be real, it's not the rich people who tend to engage in benefits fraud and I'd argue most people who do this are in desperate situations.
Law has to be proportional - you can't deal out similar punishment for benefit fraud and for murder !!
What is "fraud"? People have gotten in to trouble for accepting groceries from family members and not reporting it to the benefit office as additional (in-kind) income. Technically, it is fraud, too, so they're not wrong.
There's a long list of examples of "fraud"; like many crimes it's a scale.
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 algorithms and AI could affect those institutional injustices.
On top of these fines they have to compensate and pay damages to everyone involved though, they've reserved €1.3 billion for that. The issue affected 30.000 parents, 70.000 children; there were 8000 divorces.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toeslagenaffaire has a lot of information, but it's in Dutch; the English version of this article isn't as fleshed out.
Quite a lot of the damage is irreparable through monetary compensation. Children placed in institutions or with adoptive families because their parents ended up being destitute for instance. Suicides.
You can compensate lost years. A lot year costs the victim that year in
1) support costs for themselves (if they can't go back to the parents, this is of course a lot more than it would have been had there never been an intervention)
2) (if applicable) education costs (including the need to go for more expensive education due to age. For example, going for secondary education when already 20 years old costs a lot more than doing it at 15)
3) lost pay. This is years that they cannot work and earn, and counterintuitively this is the pay of the LAST years they're working
Of course CPS really prefers offloading all the usually massive costs of their "help" onto the children.
Yes, and besides it is the one government institution fining another, so there is really no consequence for any of this.
It kills me when government institutions get fined as a punishment. It's just the tax payers that are being punished.
We as a society need to do better to incentivize good behavior for those in trusted government positions, and hold the individuals responsible when they betray that trust.
Yes!!! Exactly and precisely this. The actual individuals should be accountable for decisions they made that ruined other peoples lives for wrongful cause.
Too often political decisions have been predicated on the notion of cost-free bullying of lower status humans to serve as grist for the mills of polemical political opposition and discourse, to feed careers. The bullfighter needs a bull and ideally it should look scary before the predetermined outcome of slaying the scapegoat takes place.
While corporations and governments only punish the people with unilateral action of malice or ignorance, one can never truly punish an institution, one seeks individuals who are responsible in the hopes of reducing the willingness of individuals to commit such acts given the possibility of individual punishment.
Nothing says impunity like impunity.
Fining the institution does nothing to discourage career hit-and-ruin experts who keep climbing the career ladder upon the backs of others.
They don't even lose their jobs. 'Just following orders'...
> I don't see how regulating algorithms and AI could affect those institutional injustices.
Because this is a dangerous technology which has only proven, again and again, to be unreliable, unethical, inaccurate, and is EASILY used by the people most likely to abuse it.
The point is not that the dutch tax office is corrupt, it is that corrupt individuals and entities are likely, and have used, this for nefarious, foul purposes. Regulating and/or banning its use is only one of many avenues to attempt to safeguard (against) this tech.
In my reading, people aren't saying the tax office corrupt, but rather that it was illegally discriminatory. Eg:
> the Dutch data protection agency also fined the Dutch tax administration €2.75 million in December 2021 for the “unlawful, discriminatory and therefore improper manner”
My point is that AI regulation is insufficient, not that it's unnecessary. Eg, the Amnesty International report says:
> civil servants spoke in denigrating terms about families with Caribbean roots, referring to them as an “Antillean nest”. Civil servants flagged these applicants through manual selection.
Manual selection is independent of AI.
Do two wrong things, when the regulators come down on one of them, point to the other and say "I don't see how this regulation could affect the real cause, over there." Good trick if you can pull it off.
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
There's a tax change that will tackle it, that should become active relatively soon.
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/03/25/wetsv...
What makes it worse is that the top bracket for income tax kicks in around €68k per annum, and is 49.5%
Are you sure you’re not mixing up the Netherlands with Ireland?
No, I’m not. Most of these companies also have incorporated in Ireland alongside the Netherlands to exploit this loophole:
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.
> corruption has enabled these companies to construct confusing and elaborate ways of avoiding their fair share of taxes.
But these are the actions OF THE STATE, not of said companies. Oh and if you think rerouting profits through Ireland is scandalous you should check out Royal Dutch Shell and their tax deal. And it's not just the Netherlands that does that, presidential Total does the same. And BP. But please don't think this is limited to oil companies, they're just the biggest fish in the pond. Their profits and payouts make Google look like a children's bank account, and WHO they go to is very telling.
https://www.reuters.com/article/global-oil-tax-havens-idUSKB...
States themselves, the people that make up the state, want to avoid taxes even more than multinationals do. You want this to stop? Your enemies are Royal Families, presidential Families (in France), dynasties in supreme courts of countries in the EU, political parties, ... these sorts of people. When it comes to payouts, by the way, these state companies make FANGs look like children's bank accounts.
And I would like to point out one major difference: these multinational billionnaires have at least done something for us, however ambivalent we may feel about their ethics. Dutch Royals have NEVER dug up any oil or so much as initiated a single green initiative at Shell. They have abused their power to get shares of these companies, and that's the sum total of their contribution. There is no ambivalence about ethics here: the people benefitting from these state cash cow companies have never contributed anything at all to these companies, nor do they intend to.
> 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.
You're right, it's no different: both are corruption.
Can you prove how it's corruption?
You're right, it's proven beyond doubt that it's corruption
I mean, you’re free to blindly dismiss obvious corruption - but it’s quite obvious that these loopholes were designed, and often illegal.
The article you posted states that Apple won their appeal against the finding of illegality in the ECJ.
Taxation is not an EU competence so in general it is not within the power of the EU to declare a member state's tax policy to be illegal. Vestager has been trying to use state aid as a vehicle to circumvent that restriction but the ECJ rebuffed her attempt to do that in Ireland. A big part of the problem is that the state aid findings rely on the assertion that tax authorities applied special rules to one particular company, which is typically not the case.
Both are tax havens.
> This scandal and the issues at the dutch tax office runs much deeper than just this one set of issues
The article doesn't even list all of the issues. For example, on top of the things you rightfully pointed out, this article also fails to mention is that (at least) 1115 children were taken away from their parents as a result of this, and despite this being known for more than half a year, not a single child has been returned to their parents[0]. There just seems to be zero interest by the authorities to help the people who went through life-destroying tragedies as a result of all this.
To paraphrase one comedian from the Dutch version of Have I Got News For You[1], "if one child would go missing tomorrow the entire country would be upside down, there would be search parties, the media would go crazy with the story. And yet at least 1115 children have been wrongfully taken from their families, we've known this for half a year, and nothing seems to happen."
[0] https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/10/over-1100-children-of-...
It seems like bodies of government without accountability have something in common: corruption.
This was not a case of corruption. Incompetence, discrimination, and lack of accountability, but not corruption. Most civil servants involved believed they were doing the right thing (despite ruining many lives in reality), and none profited personally, provided favours, or pocketed money.
"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.
Would a promotion (or not losing your job) count as a gain?
It might be a gain, but that doesn't make it corruption.
I'd say no to keeping your job, and yes to a promotion only if it is accelerated.
You think that they did this because they are purely evil? I think they had to gain something. Maybe the gain was less work.
GP used the same definition - employees of the tax-office received no illicit benefits or personal gain.
D66 who I would argue was the true winner of the election does not consist of "exact same players".
The next election, given that we don't have the new pandemic or war in Europe, will be the last one for Rutte, I believe.
D66 also wasn't the major problem here, that was clearly the VVD.
As for the last of Rutte, I thought that we had seen that one election before the last and yet he's still there.
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.
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 investigators need to look at the people who selected the datasets that were used to train the algorithms, they're the ones who bear responsibilty.
> 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".
What I don't understand looking at the article is how
> “signals” of potential fraud
turned into 100k EUR fines. Shouldn't the "signal" only flag suspect transfers and start in-person investigation?
Or did they just slap the fines without any human due-process?
I guess this is only possible because it's an administrative fine, and not a criminal case, right?
Algorithms calculating the probability of some event of a person will always be discriminatory, because the probability depends on which groups you belong to.
The problem is that algorithms are an easy way to hide behind. Think of an algorithm to check wether to do a police check for a person. Statistically black people are more likely to commit crimes. The police could easily hide behind an algorithm and say that they are not doing checks only on black people but only on persons flagged by the algorithm.
The problem with that is that most people are not criminal, but will be discriminated just because of which group they belong to.
> Statistically black people are more likely to commit crimes
Statistically black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted for crimes. So if you use an algorithm to determine who should be arrested and convicted, how long they should be sentenced, and likelihood of recidivism, and seed that algorithm with historical information about arrests and convictions tagged by race (even inadvertently through names or addresses), you end up permanently encoding untrue information like "black people are more likely to commit crimes."
an example from a particular class of crimes:
Study: Whites More Likely to Abuse Drugs Than Blacks
https://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/study-whites-more-lik...
Black and white Americans use drugs at similar rates. One group is punished more for it.
For the first article: "The study, which was published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, controlled for variables like socioeconomic status because rates of severe drug problems tend to be greater amongst the poor. Despite this, Native American youth fared worst, with 15% having a substance use disorder, compared to 9.2% for people of mixed racial heritage, 9.0% for whites, 7.7% for Hispanics, 5% for African Americans and 3.5% for Asians and Pacific Islanders."
You can get into a debate about the merits of controlling for factors, but the title is somewhat misleading. They are suggesting that whites have higher rates of drug use when you control for factors like socioeconomic status, not that the hard numbers show that whites use more drugs than blacks.
The second article is literally two paragraphs with no actual data other than an infographic. I think you need some better sources if you want to make the claims you are trying to make.
Yeah based on the article I think the racism was a feature, not a bug.
No fly lists too, no algorythms involved
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 an algorithm.
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".
Meanwhile, neural nets are accomplishing the great, hitherto-unreachable task of [checks notes] grade school math: https://www.tensorflow.org/datasets/catalog/math_dataset
Very true that this just obscures the issue with processing personal data. That of course happens already on large scales for years.
> 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 exactly how it's described round here <sigh>). This meant the school would get extra money from the government from a pot of money intended to support migrant kids with language issues.
The first time this happened we pushed straight back and asked to get this corrected (all our kids were born locally and speak the local language and dialect like everyone else round here), but the school wasn't having it. They couldn't understand why we didn't want to support the school getting extra money.
What did we learn from this? If the incentives and/or system are broken by design, it can get very hard for anyone wanting to get the system corrected later.
> but the school wasn't having it
That's rude. I would probably consider getting the school to communicate this in writing, and then report it for fraud at some point; when the kids leave the school, or when I'd be sure it couldn't cause any issues for the kids...
> I would probably consider getting the school to communicate this in writing
You would only catch the stupidest, most pitiable people with this trap.
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.
> And therw is no obligation to state a second cotizenship on any papers
You're probably right re: citizenship but this is about language, how could one "hide" being bilingual, especially if we're talking about a young child?
(Even in kindergarten all my daughter's friends are 100% aware that she and I speak a language when we're communicating solely with each other that isn't the language my daughter uses the rest of the time in kindergarten.)
Being bilingual is impossible to hide, that's true. My son had intensified German lessons as well, being bilingual with German as one of those. He was not amused, it was free private German lessons so us as parents didn't complain.
> 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 a clear sign encouraging more of this behavior from governments. Until there are clear consequences enacted by the populace, governments will continue this kind of behavior.
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.
It doesn't have to be jail time for the people involved, it could just be fines, salary cuts, demotions etc. Only the very worst offenders should go to jail.
This sounds like playing monopoly with taxpayer dollars.
> Until there are clear consequences enacted by the populace, governments will continue this kind of behavior.
In fact, the government staged a token dissolution right before scheduled general elections, and proceeded to win the elections and come right back into power. Nothing changed.
Truly magical how accountability works.
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.
I'm with you. The fact that we can't even blame FPP voting systems, gerrymandering or other voter suppression tactics for any of this makes it all so much more frustrating. Apparently a significant part of the population either doesn't care about this, or worse, approves of the systemic racism.
Well, I lean Anarchist and am not a Dutch citizen, but while living in the Netherlands for a couple of years as a post-doc, I was also disheartened to see the Dutch right-wing that dominant in national politics. Do you believe that, say, a GroenLinks-led coalition would have handled this much better?
I could imagine GroenLinks also not being up to the task of getting the bureaucracy to 'do the right thing'. But they would be honest about their own failure and keep trying, perhaps taking drastic measures.
Their honesty about their failure might mean they lose power too soon for a culture shift in the bureaucracy to actually occur.
In the documentary Alone Against the State, five mothers who became victims of the Dutch childcare benefits scandal share the chilling stories of how their lives and that of their children were destroyed by a state system deprived of humanity.
It is a Dutch documentary, unfortunately without English subtitles:
https://www.2doc.nl/documentaires/series/2doc/2021/alleen-te...
This 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.
> The "algorithm", is just another plausible deniability cover for institutionalized discrimination against various minorities and the poor who are least able to fight back.
What makes this extra infuriating is that even before these algorithms were implemented in the Netherlands there were already plenty of people warning us that this would happen if we ever would be so foolish to do so. I can only presume they feel a certain frustrated kinship with climate scientists right now
Reminds me of this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56718036 700 Post office franchisees made criminals by faulty accounting software.
> 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 fairly investigate everyone, and nobody who's not defrauding loses out, this practice would be deeply racist and disproportionately punish the minority.
In short, we can't human-wash this problem at the end. Even if everyone punished was a fraudster, strong bias in the initial list is still clearly an issue.
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.
I only have as much information as is included in the original article, but this seems like a big issue to me:
>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.
That is indeed a big problem. I wouldn't be surprised if this marking as a risk factor wasn't even backed by data. (Note that even if it was backed by data, it would still be wrong).
> Note that even if it was backed by data, it would still be wrong.
Is it? This is the big question, as far as I can see. If my country has green people and blue people, and green people are overwhelmingly more likely to commit fraud, is it wrong to require additional fraud checks on the basis of being green?
Note that this isn't a conviction. It's accepted that the standard is not so exacting that no one innocent must be subject to investigation - that would be impossible under realistic circumstances. (Hell, even convictions don't meet that standard.)
On the other hand, I do accept the argument that you would have to be very, very cautious that you don't end up with a feedback loop if you did this - in other words, a system where you keep convicting green people because you investigate them, and the data therefore keep suggesting that green people have a greater propensity for crime, and so forth. That's undoubtedly happening in many countries, I'm sure.
This is getting off-topic. But it still is.
I'll stipulate that in this scenario the data themselves are not actually biased. Whilst in reality these data often are biased by things like disproportionate policing and heavy punishhment.
Even then, discriminating by government based on race is bad even when a statistical basis for such discrimination exists. What makes "race" problematic to discriminate on is how easy it is to see "race". Or rather, how easily most people classify and distinguish between ethnicities based on how they look.
For an example, lets start with a small difference between blue and green people. blue people are twice as likely to commit crime as green people, with a criminality rate of 0.2% vs 0.1%. If this starts being how you police, if this 2x difference starts guiding decisions, then a lot of innocent people start being disadvantaged. The extra problem is that it is very easy to see if someone is blue or green. So it becomes really easy for a lot of people to start acting based on this 2x difference. This harms all blue people which is disproportionate. It then becomes a lot easier to get to the feedback loop you talked about.
Yeah, I agree. That's fair. I've thought about this before - I worked at a bank a couple of years ago, and our CCO (Chief Credit Officer in this instance) wanted to implement a rule, in our credit decisioning models, to decline people whose surnames had 5 or more vowels. It was a naked (and admitted) proxy for Africans, and probably some other 'ethnic' people too[0].
And it made me think: I suspect lots of our ML/NN models function like that. They pick race, or they pick a proxy for race. In situations where the 'ground truth' metric genuinely is racially skewed, it can be hard to tell, and it's just not realistic to demand that people make their models inaccurate for the sake of racial equity.
But it highlights, for me, the unavoidable danger of black-box models. I don't mean some logistic regression or decision tree, because those - while not literally explaining themselves - can be figured out if you have some domain knowledge of the parameters. But the overfitting machines that we call neural nets, well, I suspect this is happening everywhere, at a cost in both equity and also accuracy/reliability. (The probably-apocryphal story of the computer vision model for estimating density of people in a train station, but which ended up just looking at the clock on the wall, comes to mind.)
[0] I remember it exactly because it also would have captured me, incidentally, with my plummy double-barrelled surname - though that's beside the point here.
Usually there is more nuance than that. It sounds high and mighty to take the principled position, but reality is that major offenders of this type of fraud are often ethnic gangs, and ignoring that signal is dumb.
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.
OK but are poor people and minorities more likely to commit benefits fraud? Because if so, I think that's fair game as an input, (obviously not if it's the only input).
Not sure about that in the real world. The temptation of "algorithms" is in reducing human workload which, realistically, means saving on salary costs by having fewer humans in the loop. The attraction of cost savings – and the externalization of repercussions – biases decisionmakers into believing that algorithms are a great solution. Yes, the real problem is abuse of algorithmic decisionmaking, and a lack of oversight, but in the real world you can't separate a technology from the people who use it.
The families were guilty of breaking the community guidelines /s
I'm dutch and this really is disgusting. But you have to understand that the Dutch population has no real problem with this. The exact same political parties were elected a few months after this scandal. It's just democracy really.
Probably because most Dutch people assume shit like this can't/won't happen to them so it's no biggie that the lives of 5 families were ruined. Even less of an issues for them if some of those families affected were immigrants and not Dutch natives.
5 families? the article speaks of thousands of people ...
Except it was a lot more than just five families.
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...
Where is "around here"?
A EU country.
Another issue that contributed to this scandal is that the rules for benefits (not just social benefits) are often such that you have to request it up front at the beginning of the year, but if at the end of the year it turns out that your situation changed midway and you no longer had the (full) right to the benefit, you have to pay it back along with a fine. It's really easy to not be aware of this.
I don't understand the article.
Suppose they had an algorithm for computing a risk score. Ok, so someone is determined to have a "high risk score". That doesn't mean that they've done anything wrong; at most, it means prioritizing them for closer scrutiny. That could still be discriminatory (e.g. focus on Turkish/Moroccan immigrants), but in itself - it's not supposed to lose anyone their benefits.
Also, the article says:
> Citizens had no way of ... defending themselves.
Why could they not sue the tax authorities in court, asking the court to order the tax authorities to withdraw their payment demands? If there was no evidence of them having evaded taxes, I mean.
High risk score means you’re under scrutiny. Once you’re under scrutiny every minor thing that goes wrong or is unclear is by default assumed to be fraud and you get slapped with (often outrageously high) fines, payable immediately. You can only appeal after the fact, so you’re drowning in debt even before the first judge looks at your case.
That is assuming a judge gets anywhere near your case. This often didn’t happen because access to the law is made extremely difficult in the Netherlands (on purpose). The people this affected mostly did not have the skills to find their way in the Dutch legal system so they were ruined.
All of this is by design, by the way: the system assumes ill will by default, spends an inordinate amount of resources on detecting it and punishes it severely all because being tough on fraud polls well.
This is utterly bonkers. The discrimination sounds completely blatant and is it actually saying any case flagged by the algorithm was considered and treated as proven fraud rather than just raised for investigation?!? That’s absurd.
That's not really an algorithm usage issue but an administrative ones. Really. The issue does not arise from an ineffective/wrong system but for the absence of quick, powerful and effective human backup.
A small example: automated procedures, if well designed tend to be really effective *in means* witch means they are good. BUT they tend to have hard to spot (or even evident, but no one care up front) loopholes and corner cases that makes not them but their use a nightmare. In those case the solution is simple: a human that pick all issues not automatically treated.
The *administrative* issue is this: those who choose automation must know it can fail and so must be prepared for a normal and regular and effective backup.
Personally if a day my country tax agency ask me 100k euros for a clear error I feel no specific scandal, anyone can makes error, but I expect to have a phone number to call where someone pick the call quickly and in little time we can sort out the issue. It's not a life-or-death thing, and it's complex, issues normally happen and that's is. If I can't call because no one answer or they answer but they are powerless or there is no quick solution than it's not the erroneous claim the scandal, but the absence of means to sort it out rapidly.
The perils of false positives and making decisions based on probability. These governments are punishing innocents and hoping the guilty is among them. Horrifying.
Sounds a bit like Australia's illegal Robodebt scheme:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
The Australian system was simpler than the Dutch system, comparing social benefits paid with averaged tax-income from the ATO. It was a stupidly wrong calculation, the averaged income is much higher in people with inconsistent income than it actually is, so people were hounded by debt collectors for nonexisting debt. A$1.2 billion false debt for a nation of 25 million people. A good number of associated suicides.
Of course, there was no real accountability, with the system having been introduced by the previous government who is now in opposition. Money has been paid back but everybody involved still has their job.
> "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 luddists pandering on the confused using wrong arguments. Sigh.
It should've been (and almost surely was) some specific person's job to sign off on this thing being at least reasonable before deploying it, which they failed to do. Successfully redirecting attention from that specific person's failure to do their job (and their manager who failed to ensure they were doing their job, etc) to the abstract idea of Algorithms is some exceptional accountability judo.
Our prime minister (Rutte) is known as 'teflon Rutte' because no real scandal seems to stick to him. The entire idea of dodging accountability seems to be present from the very top of government.
From what the article spelled out, using algorithms isn't precisely the risk, but using them in a completely horrendously unpracticed and uninformed way seems to be.
> 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.
She was a student at the time she received the letters claiming 'missing information' that led to the (unjust) claim. This does not mean she didn't have a job before that or some other occupation. She was around 30 at that time, and study was just part of her career path.
If you have several children, the child care allowance adds up — I receive over €1000 a month for one preschool child. Multiply this for more than one child and several years…
It is a system that is increasingly seen as hostile to citizens, because you need to update your registration with every change in income. It's silly too, because the allowance you receive goes to a child day care centre or kindergarten anyway, so you are just shovelling money around which leads to almost all parents being burdened with something completely avoidable. The answer is to just make child day care free for all children and not bother citizens with subsidies to pay it. It's probably cheaper to do it that way (we would be following in the footsteps of other progressive countries).
How often does income change?
I don't see what's 'hostile' about asking people to fill in a form a couple of times per year (at most) for €12k.
It changes every time your salary changes and when you take unpaid leave, even if only for a few days. For a dual income household this is already a bother because of the details you have to enter. For households with lower incomes it also doesn't stop with child care subsidies, but also a health care, rent, and an additional child specific subsidy to manage. Now consider that many people in lower income brackets do not have a fixed salary but one dependant on hours worked (think retail staff etc.), and you can almost guarantee that you will receive too much at some point, which will be reclaimed.
Compared with the ten minutes filing taxes takes here (with everything prefilled and rarely a need to change anything) this system is a high-risk travesty that wastes a nation's time.
€100,000 = ~$108,000
So if that's the credit for 3 children, for 4 years, that's ~$750/month. I have zero idea about how much it would cost for the Dutch, but in the closest city center to me in the US, the average cost for a licensed daycare center is ~$1300/month.
Not unrealistic, really, unless I missed something.
210 euro a month for 2 days a week supposedly https://www.xpat.nl/living-netherlands/kids/day-care/
That may well have been including punitive components. They're really good at that.
Born and raised in EU South, I grew up looking up to Northern Europe with regards to their efficiency, values, etc.
This is news I'd expect to hear from a backwater country I'd never heard off. But I'm afraid it is just yet one data point of how wrong I was and how bad things have gone in the heart of EU and maybe the whole western world.
I'm on welfare in france, and sometimes I wonder if the government is going to find some excuse to stop giving me money.
Could be "not applying to enough job offers", while most employers are always complaining about candidates not being skilled enough, which is why unemployment is so high.
This is happening to my half-sick mother, right now, 6 months before retirement (!), because Pôle Emploi is seemingly unable to both check its own database for the presence of a recent job offer she was rejected from and also to reply to (or even read ?) the (e-)mail pointing this out that has been sent to it. Going to have to seize the Ombudsperson now...
Some related levity :
Nistoire, professeur de chômage - Groland - CANAL+ :
When are we going to bite the bullet and require governmental licensing for algorithms? I know HN hates the idea because we're all too busy using algorithms to ruin people's lives for profit, but it needs to happen and it will happen sooner or later.
Once upon a time I made the mistake of incorporating a startup in the Netherlands. Never. Again.
What went wrong?
Based on their username I would guess "being not-white in a country that is totally convinced it isn't racist but is actually seriously racist".
Also, it's not discussed much but the Netherlands has a very serious "old boy network" problem where white douchebags who didn't achieve much during their studies except boozing with other white douchebags keep failing upwards.
It's the reason why me and my mixed ethnicity background do not regret emigrating either, despite the superior bike infrastructure and hagelslag.
Mind you, literally anyone who doesn't fit this mentality in some way (ethnicity, sex, character, etc.) is quickly considered an outsider with problems getting in. You can be a white heterosexual native guy and still struggle because the Dutch mentality doesn't mesh with you personally. Very much because "boozing with other white douchebags" concerns all descriptors.
It's why the Dutch "kan niet"-mentality is so prominent.
Very much this. The Netherlands is essentially a frat house kept afloat by dangerously unregulated immigrant labor, a dwindling number of middle class professionals and tax laws that would be an embarrassment to all but the most unrepentant of tax havens.
>but the Netherlands has a very serious "old boy network" problem where white douchebags who didn't achieve much during their studies except boozing with other white douchebags keep failing upwards.
This isn't some Dutch thing. I've seen the exact same thing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the big-name companies in those countries (like BMW, etc.).
Basically, to succeeded, be a white local from a mid-upper/upper class family, go to a famous uni there and party, and you'll fail yourself to the top management in a big company there quite nicely, while immigrants have glass ceilings to make sure they know their place.
Pretty much this. Despite the fact that I am blonde and from Europe. Plus (from my perspective and specific to the Netherlands): it's an ecosystem of speculating "professionals". The Tax stuff is all done in Dutch. Accountants and the likes demand huge fees, and the Tax Authority assumes you are a Tax Resident if you incorporate a BV there. It took 4 years after I left Amsterdam (and about 20k EUR) to get rid of the annoyance of the Belastingdienst / Accountants demanding I would file personal and business stuff there, while I was actually living in another continent. I have been living in more than 8 Countries up to now, and the Dutch Society is the only one I am positive I will never ever try to join again.
We're in agreement - I did not mean to imply it's an exclusively Dutch problem, I was just pointing out that it's a problem that isn't brought up that much when people talk about issues in Dutch society.
Also, since "white" is a flexible term that varies per country but always basically designates which socially constructed ethnicities are the "exclusive clubs" on top of society, it should probably be pointed out to for everyone who has no experience with North-Western European whiteness that people from Eastern and Southern European countries are not considered white in these countries most of the time either, except perhaps when they're compared to immigrants from countries even further away.
Why? From what I heard UK, Ireland, Luxembourg and Netherlands are THE places in Europe to incorporate a startup, at least compared to the bureocratic horror stories I heard from places like France or Germany.
My guess - "incorporated in NL" has some high fixed costs, whether in actual dollars or in hassles & overhead. Any FAANG can spend a $1M or ten to farm out the latter to professionals. But if you're an actual startup...
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?
"Risks of using algorithms"? Clearly the Enlightenment has ended, because this is a headline that would only make sense in the age of the Inquisition.
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...
> 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.
> risks of using algorithms
Bubblesort so dangerous. Not exactly the best headline, is it?
Presuming a sorted list gives an 'objective view' which you can act on directly, without needing to check context, interpretation, bias in your input, and unintended consequences of treating this sorted list as truth, is quite dangerous.
Whether that is done with bubblesort or not indeed does not matter. But thinking that acting based purely on data and data processing is a good idea, that sure as shit matters. In fact, it is a big mistake.
You clearly have not encountered the term “human sorting” eh?
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?
That analysis has been done and the conclusions are devastating for the tax office.
https://www.consultancy.nl/nieuws/39000/pwc-belastingdienst-... (dutch)
Devastating? I don't see anything devastating in the article you linked. Perhaps you can point it out? The language is very weak.
> PwC considers it plausible that the people who ended up on the blacklist on the basis of appearance or nationality were disadvantaged as a result. Like others on the list, they presumably did not qualify for smooth debt restructuring, debt forgiveness, or a personal payment arrangement. Unlike in the allowance affair, according to PwC, the list played no role in the assessment of income tax returns.
aannemelijk vermoedelijk
They can't point to a single case in which this happened?
You could of course start with the first paragraph:
"Bij het inschatten van frauderisico’s beoordeelde de Belastingdienst zeker tientallen mensen op hun nationaliteit en uiterlijk, zo blijkt uit onderzoek van PwC. Zo kwamen de mensen terecht op de Fraude Signaleringsvoorziening (FSV), beter bekend als de zwarte lijst."
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.
Income and social mobility might corralled with fraud.
Country of origin might cause low income and low social mobility.
Unintentional fraud is probably way higher among immigrants, it is hard to avoid "fraud" when filling in forms if you don't understand all the rules, even worse if the form isn't even in your native language.
There is no "Unintentional fraud". If it's unintentional, it's a mistake. See also: