[urtie]

Just to get you an idea of how wrongheaded this entire thing was, I have a personal anecdote relating to this shitstorm.

Back in autumn 2013 I got a letter stating that I had received too much in child care benefits, with a request to pay it back. On the back of said letter was the text 'If you are still entitled to child care benefits and want to settle this amount against upcoming entitlements, you do not have to do anything'. Given as I was still entitled to benefits, I proceeded to not do anything. A few weeks later I got a reminder, once again stating that if I wanted to settle, I wouldn't have to do a thing. The reminder was followed by a final notice with opportunity to pay, once again with the exact same text on the back of the letter. So, obviously, I once again did nothing.

Then we got a 'Dwangbevel in naam des konings', i.e. a writ of execution in the name of the king. Red envelope. No added text. So I had to pay up. Now, as you may well guess, the tax service had already also started settling against the benefits that I was still entitled to! This prompted me to write a strongly worded letter, asking the tax service in no unclear language what I should have done differently, and requesting them to not dock me for that particular money twice. Literally the only reaction to that letter from the tax service was in silently restituting to me the double payment.

Now, I'm a reasonably well paid and well educated software developer, who just happens to hold two nationalities. I am perfectly sure that I would not even have had a reminder had I just had the Dutch nationality.

I could have paid in the first place and not settled against upcoming benefits; I was just lazy. However, imagine you're scraping by on minimum wage and are put in such a situation. There is no other way you could have acted than I did, but you also would not have been able to pay up to the writ of execution. And there would have been no recourse!

Add to that the fact that in many cases, the people hadn't even actually been paid too much, as I had, but merely been tagged as possibly fraudulent and put in to the system for reclaiming paid benefits, so the government could take a stance of being hard against benefits fraud while figuring out if any fraud had taken place in the first place.