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As a Dutch citizen, I like my government to be consistent and not retroactively petty because of their own failings.

On the other hand, the government in general and the tax authorities in particular have a history of backtracking and retroactively diminishing promised rulings. Refer to the 30% ruling changes that were retroactively applied after employees had moved to the country and had received a signed declaration from the authority.

Agreed, as far as I can see, it was a calculated risk that companies would abuse it. Better to just suck it up and hope for public outrage in some of the more despicable cases, which is just what happened here.

> Agreed, as far as I can see, it was a calculated risk that companies would abuse it

During the announcement of the first support package it was explicitly stated that due to the short time frame they had to operate in, they were taking this risk for the greater good. I believe that in the next support package they immediately made it a lot better w.r.t to abusing support.

Personally I really liked how upfront they were with it.

Yeah it's actually the part of the pandemic the government handled the best as far as I can see, they got it up and running really quickly

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