When bureaucracies attack

An unprecedented affair causes the Dutch government to resign

Imagine this. A government supports low and middle income families with childcare benefits. A pretty standard policy that we see at work in many developed nations. But governments that do this have to ensure that their money is spent properly. They have at their disposal tax departments (like the IRS or CRA) that have all legal means available to ensure that funds that are mistakenly paid or overpaid make their way back to the government’s treasury. Now sometimes these tax collectors are given incentives to their employees to ensure they really are motivated and collect all the funds that a nation’s treasury thinks it is missing. And so it becomes possible to hunt down childcare benefit recipients and turn unsuspecting citizens into criminals.

This is what happened in The Netherlands over a number of years, from 2013 to 2019, to be precise. Somehow, somewhere the Dutch tax authorities fell prey to the idea that childcare benefits had been fraudulently obtained and that it was time to claw them back. And they went about their collection work with zeal, using all legal means available: collection agencies, court orders, repossession, you name it, the force of a dismayed bureaucracy was unleashed in full. Thousands of unwitting and innocent parents were on the receiving end, often ending up ‘owing’ tens of thousands of Euros in allegedly fraudulently obtained childcare support payments. And it came down on the very weakest: lower income families, immigrants and minorities who often did not have the background, skillset or network to effectively respond to the blunt legal weapons that confronted them. The stories in Dutch media were and continue to be beyond heartbreaking. Evictions, garnished bank accounts, forced repayments, no tool was left unused to claw back every last Euro from unsuspecting and indeed mostly innocent citizens. The resulting personal dramas range from divorces to depression to kids that had to interrupt their education to an inability to put food on the table to ultimately destroyed lives.

But it gets worse. On the other side was Dutch parliament catching on and pressing the government for answers and hopefully a resolution to save lives and ensure that something like this could not ever happen again. Two MPs, Renske Leijten from the Socialist Party and Pieter Omtzigt from the Christian-Democrats (a party that is part of the current coalition government) went after this with unstoppable energy in order to seek answers and hopefully find a measure of justice for the victims. But, the harder they fought and sought, the more barriers were thrown up, by both the tax collectors and their political masters. The information they received was often redacted, not delivered or purposely withheld. In early 2020 a new State Secretary of Finance was appointed to clean up, but as 2020 unfolded it became clear that it was hard to get to the bottom of the affair. In the meantime the suffering of the affected childcare recipients continued with ongoing court cases and forced repayment plans. Even the judiciary came to be seen in a negative light.

Although there was now clear recognition that something went wrong, there was no plan to resolve and clean up the mess. The prime minister had been absent on this file, but could at this point no longer continue his disengagement. A special parliamentary committee was formed and their verdict at the end of 2020 was devastating: the core principles of the rule of law had been violated.

Yesterday Dutch PM Rutte did the only thing he could do, he hopped on his bike and visited the King to tender his resignation and that of his entire cabinet. Among the ruins of this scandal the questions are deep. How could an open and social liberal democracy such as the Dutch unleash such a reckless attack on some of its own and weakest citizens? Why did it not stop, even after it had been discovered ? Why was parliament stonewalled, again and again? Why did the core principles of the rule of law and parliamentary privilege no longer work ? The childcare benefits affairs is now a case study of one of the most egregious abuses of the state apparatus against citizens.

With two months to go to the regularly scheduled election all of this is fodder for the campaign and in particular for the populist parties on the right and left, who have both been doing well in the polls. Rutte has managed to keep difficult coalitions together under challenging circumstances and he is the only candidate at present to gain enough votes to lead a new one. But it will require rare political genius to form a government if the elections yield an even more fractured parliament, which is a very likely outcome. What will be even more challenging is the task to restore confidence in a system that in the last year already had been bruised and shaken because of the ongoing pandemic. The Dutch are in for a period of prolonged political instability.