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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
