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.
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...
turned out that in the period 2007-2013, 805 Bulgarians
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.
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.
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...
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.
But what would all the important middle men do for a living then? /s
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.
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.
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.
Eg: FAANG, Disney, IKEA, Uber, Mars Chocolate, etc etc
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/03/25/wetsv...
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-...
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.
As for the last of Rutte, I thought that we had seen that one election before the last and yet he's still there.
> 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.
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.
"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".
> “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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
You would only catch the stupidest, most pitiable people with this trap.
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.)
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.
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.
It is a Dutch documentary, unfortunately without English subtitles:
https://www.2doc.nl/documentaires/series/2doc/2021/alleen-te...
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.
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
This is the real story here. The algorithm is incidental.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A student can get €100,000 for child care?
That is amazing.
For me, that is the most surprising thing in the entire article.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some related levity :
Nistoire, professeur de chômage - Groland - CANAL+ :
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.
[0] - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nadine-dorries-micros...
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.
Maybe we should first do a correlation and causality analysis and see what it yields instead of closing our eyes because of PC?
https://www.consultancy.nl/nieuws/39000/pwc-belastingdienst-... (dutch)
> 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?
Is fraud genetic? I don't think so, so it's only a correlation at most.
Country of origin might cause low income and low social mobility.
