Hearings started this week in a wide-ranging inquiry into the Dutch government’s anti-fraud policies in the last 30 years, including accusations that officials deliberately targeted families and benefit claimants from ethnic minorities.

The main focus of the probe is the childcare benefits scandal, known as the toeslagenaffaire, which triggered the resignation of Mark Rutte’s third cabinet in January 2021.

Thousands of working families claiming tax allowances to pay for childcare were wrongly assumed to be defrauding the system if they made minor errors in their paperwork, such as failing to submit supporting documents on time. A parliamentary inquiry concluded they had suffered an “unprecedented injustice”.

They were forced to pay back the money, sometimes amounting to tens of thousands of euros, with no opportunity to appeal or apply for debt relief, leaving some destitute and forcing them to leave their homes.

The inquiry beginning this week will look at wider anti-fraud measures stretching back three decades to identify how the childcare benefits scandal emerged.

Rutte summoned

Caretaker prime minister Mark Rutte is due testify under oath to the inquiry three times, covering his 13 years as leader of the cabinet and his previous role as junior social affairs minister between 2002 and 2004.

In 2003 Rutte wrote a letter demanding extra checks on people of Somali origin who were claiming welfare support, after a group of Somalis were found to have committed benefit fraud in the UK.

The inquiry will also look at the so-called Bulgarian fraud, in which Bulgarian criminal gangs arranged for busloads of people to travel to the Netherlands and register as residents so they could claim healthcare and housing benefits. As soon as the money was paid into their accounts they returned to Bulgaria without de-registering.

The furore around the Bulgarian fraud was seen as one of the reasons the tax office and other institutions started to take a more aggressive stance towards perceived benefit fraud by non-Dutch citizens.

Committee members have spent more than six months interviewing more than 100 victims of excessive anti-fraud measures and requested 700,000 supporting documents.

But the collapse of the cabinet in July has added urgency to the exercise, as many members of the committee will be leaving parliament when it is dissolved in November.

“Pay up”

On the opening day of the inquiry on Wednesday, one of the victims, Dulce Goncalves-Tavares, told how her life had been turned upside down after she was ordered to repay €200,000 in childcare support allowances.

“It was a case of pay up,” she said. “You’re a fraudster. They weren’t friendly.”

The tax office sequestrated part of her earnings to pay back the debt, leaving her with as little as €250 a month to support her family, Goncalves said. Eventually it admitted its mistake and apologised.

A couple, Gerda and Jurgen Deceuninck, were suspected of fraud because they added an extra 30 minutes of childcare to one claim, which they deducted from a later week.

Initially the tax office ordered them to repay the benefits without any explanation. Later on they discovered they had been labelled fraudsters. As a result of the episode their children were removed from the family home and placed in care.

“How do you compensate for the fact that the government has had our children for nine years?” Gerda asked. “You can’t compensate for that anymore.”