[HN Gopher] Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over ri...
___________________________________________________________________
Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using
algorithms
Author : Kiala
Score : 215 points
Date : 2022-04-13 12:49 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.politico.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.politico.eu)
| jokoon wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| This is happening to my half-sick mother, right now, 6 months
| before retirement (!), because Pole 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 chomage - Groland - CANAL+ :
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Yck-aO4Ww (fr)
| mahesh_rm wrote:
| Once upon a time I made the mistake of incorporating a startup in
| the Netherlands. Never. Again.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| orangepurple wrote:
| What went wrong?
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> 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.
| mahesh_rm wrote:
| 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| 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.
| mtts wrote:
| 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.
| bell-cot wrote:
| 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...
| Tozen wrote:
| 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _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
| tomputer wrote:
| 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...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| > The Dutch tax authorities now face a new EUR3.7 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.
| yunohn wrote:
| > 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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?
| StreamBright wrote:
| 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.
| rjmunro wrote:
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This sounds like playing monopoly with taxpayer dollars.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The perils of false positives and making decisions based on
| probability. These governments are punishing innocents and hoping
| the guilty is among them. Horrifying.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| 5 families? the article speaks of _thousands_ of people ...
| jb1991 wrote:
| Except it was a _lot_ more than just five families.
| goatcode wrote:
| 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.
| wallaBBB wrote:
| 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.
| legulere wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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._
|
| https://www.vox.com/2015/3/17/8227569/war-on-drugs-racism
| skrbjc wrote:
| 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.
| puszczyk wrote:
| 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?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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.
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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".
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| No fly lists too, no algorythms involved
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| 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.
| samhw wrote:
| 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
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Very true that this just obscures the issue with processing
| personal data. That of course happens already on large
| scales for years.
| neaden wrote:
| Yeah based on the article I think the racism was a feature, not
| a bug.
| fallingknife wrote:
| > 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.
| Sharlin wrote:
| 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.
| orangepurple wrote:
| The families were guilty of breaking the community guidelines
| /s
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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).
| samhw wrote:
| > 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| samhw wrote:
| 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.
| fallingknife wrote:
| 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).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
| mtts wrote:
| 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.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > 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.
| liftm wrote:
| > risks of using algorithms
|
| Bubblesort so dangerous. Not exactly the best headline, is it?
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| smcl wrote:
| 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...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| 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...
| rjmunro wrote:
| Where is "around here"?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| A EU country.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _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-...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JIejxvgjz0
| StreamBright wrote:
| It seems like bodies of government without accountability have
| something in common: corruption.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| 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.
| StreamBright wrote:
| "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.
| evandijk70 wrote:
| GP used the same definition - employees of the tax-office
| received no illicit benefits or personal gain.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| > [...] 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.
| edejong wrote:
| Would a promotion (or not losing your job) count as a
| gain?
| zambal wrote:
| It might be a gain, but that doesn't make it corruption.
| rocqua wrote:
| I'd say no to keeping your job, and yes to a promotion
| only if it is accelerated.
| StreamBright wrote:
| You think that they did this because they are purely
| evil? I think they had to gain something. Maybe the gain
| was less work.
| yunohn wrote:
| 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
| Deukhoofd wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| chekibreki wrote:
| Are you sure you're not mixing up the Netherlands with
| Ireland?
| janandonly wrote:
| Both.
|
| https://www.oxfam.org/en/research/netherlands-tax-haven
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Both are tax havens.
| yunohn wrote:
| 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.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > 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.
| yunohn wrote:
| I mean, you're free to blindly dismiss obvious corruption
| - but it's quite obvious that these loopholes were
| designed, and often illegal.
|
| Eg, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_v_Commission
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| 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.
| jeltz wrote:
| The Dutch allow companies to negotiate individual rates
| which are kept secret. No, this is not competition, it is
| corruption.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Economic agency is not corruption. It's no different from
| negotiating tax breaks with local governments here in the
| United States.
| account42 wrote:
| You're right, it's no different: both are corruption.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Can you prove how it's corruption?
| eesmith wrote:
| It's shocking to read, and reminds me of the British Post
| Office scandal.
|
| A EUR3.7 million + EUR2.75 million fines are a slap-on-the
| wrist for what happened. Even EUR30,000/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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, and besides it is the one government institution fining
| another, so there is really no consequence for any of this.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| 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.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| On top of these fines they have to compensate and pay damages
| to everyone involved though, they've reserved EUR1.3 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| 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.
| Kaotique wrote:
| 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...
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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>
| fransje26 wrote:
| 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.
| berkes wrote:
| > 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.
| yunohn wrote:
| > 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/artikelen/2021
| /bu...
| secondcoming wrote:
| Genuine question... is 'people from Bulgaria' a euphemism for
| Roma gyspies?
| Kaotique wrote:
| No.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Sure, but using this logic civilizations themselves are
| also basically Ponzi schemes.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > 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.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| > 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.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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%.
| djbebs wrote:
| 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.
| Kaotique wrote:
| 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.
| Beldin wrote:
| > _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.
| orwin wrote:
| 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.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > (because if you just give services, it doesn't count
| toward GDP)
|
| And considering GDP as the most important metric isn't
| peak dumbassery ?
| harvey9 wrote:
| Who would give the services if there is no payment? Are
| you talking about a barter society?
| em500 wrote:
| 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.
| mrep wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > 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.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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.
| nullc wrote:
| > 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.
| styluss wrote:
| > mass fraud by people from Bulgaria
|
| turned out that in the period 2007-2013, 805 Bulgarians
|
| From https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarenfraude
| Kaotique wrote:
| Thank you for pointing that out. I guess I should not have
| used the mass adjective.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The Bulgarians were very visible, but not the main
| reason:
|
| https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/artikelen/2021
| /bu...
| falcolas wrote:
| 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.
| cjrp wrote:
| 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?
| falcolas wrote:
| 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.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 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.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| anamax wrote:
| 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."
| Beldin wrote:
| > _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...
| berkes wrote:
| 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.
| gedy wrote:
| > 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
| sfifs wrote:
| 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.
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| 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.
| justin_oaks wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/247350.pdf
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Law has to be proportional - you can't deal out similar
| punishment for benefit fraud and for murder !!
| [deleted]
| gsliepen wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| "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.
| drno123 wrote:
| 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?
| turbo_bean wrote:
| 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.
| chekibreki wrote:
| 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?
| croes wrote:
| 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.
| danamit wrote:
| Income and social mobility might corralled with fraud.
|
| Country of origin might cause low income and low social
| mobility.
| Jensson wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| There is no "Unintentional fraud". If it's unintentional,
| it's a mistake. See also:
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud
| jacquesm wrote:
| That analysis has been done and the conclusions are devastating
| for the tax office.
|
| https://www.consultancy.nl/nieuws/39000/pwc-belastingdienst-...
| (dutch)
| orangepurple wrote:
| 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?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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."
| logifail wrote:
| > 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.
| DavideNL wrote:
| > 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...
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I would probably consider getting the school to communicate
| this in writing
|
| You would only catch the stupidest, most pitiable people with
| this trap.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| logifail wrote:
| > 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.)
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| mint2 wrote:
| 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.
| kkfx wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > 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 EUR100,000.
|
| A student can get EUR100,000 for child care?
|
| That is amazing.
|
| For me, that is the most surprising thing in the entire article.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That may well have been including punitive components. They're
| really good at that.
| Loughla wrote:
| EUR100,000 = ~$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.
| pacifika wrote:
| 210 euro a month for 2 days a week supposedly
| https://www.xpat.nl/living-netherlands/kids/day-care/
| Freak_NL wrote:
| 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 EUR1000 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).
| secondcoming wrote:
| 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 EUR12k.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| 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.
| ai_ja_nai wrote:
| > "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.
| convexfunction wrote:
| 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.
| rocqua wrote:
| 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.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| nicgrev103 wrote:
| Reminds me of this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56718036
| 700 Post office franchisees made criminals by faulty accounting
| software.
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