Dutch scandal serves as a warning for Europe over risks of using algorithms
politico.eu
politico.eu
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.
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...
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.
turned out that in the period 2007-2013, 805 Bulgarians
https://www.vpro.nl/argos/lees/onderwerpen/artikelen/2021/bu...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And considering GDP as the most important metric isn't peak dumbassery ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything else is just an excuse to get higher budgets and grift.
But what would all the important middle men do for a living then? /s
Exchange some popular issue for access to user data, the same that happened with telephone providers. Just be realistic about it.
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.
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.
There's a long list of examples of "fraud"; like many crimes it's a scale.
A €3.7 million + €2.75 million fines are a slap-on-the wrist for what happened. Even €30,000/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.
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.
1) support costs for themselves (if they can't go back to the parents, this is of course a lot more than it would have been had there never been an intervention)
2) (if applicable) education costs (including the need to go for more expensive education due to age. For example, going for secondary education when already 20 years old costs a lot more than doing it at 15)
3) lost pay. This is years that they cannot work and earn, and counterintuitively this is the pay of the LAST years they're working
Of course CPS really prefers offloading all the usually massive costs of their "help" onto the children.
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.
Too often political decisions have been predicated on the notion of cost-free bullying of lower status humans to serve as grist for the mills of polemical political opposition and discourse, to feed careers. The bullfighter needs a bull and ideally it should look scary before the predetermined outcome of slaying the scapegoat takes place.
While corporations and governments only punish the people with unilateral action of malice or ignorance, one can never truly punish an institution, one seeks individuals who are responsible in the hopes of reducing the willingness of individuals to commit such acts given the possibility of individual punishment.
Nothing says impunity like impunity.
Fining the institution does nothing to discourage career hit-and-ruin experts who keep climbing the career ladder upon the backs of others.
Because this is a dangerous technology which has only proven, again and again, to be unreliable, unethical, inaccurate, and is EASILY used by the people most likely to abuse it.
The point is not that the dutch tax office is corrupt, it is that corrupt individuals and entities are likely, and have used, this for nefarious, foul purposes. Regulating and/or banning its use is only one of many avenues to attempt to safeguard (against) this tech.
> the Dutch data protection agency also fined the Dutch tax administration €2.75 million in December 2021 for the “unlawful, discriminatory and therefore improper manner”
My point is that AI regulation is insufficient, not that it's unnecessary. Eg, the Amnesty International report says:
> civil servants spoke in denigrating terms about families with Caribbean roots, referring to them as an “Antillean nest”. Civil servants flagged these applicants through manual selection.
Manual selection is independent of AI.
Eg: FAANG, Disney, IKEA, Uber, Mars Chocolate, etc etc
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/03/25/wetsv...
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.
But these are the actions OF THE STATE, not of said companies. Oh and if you think rerouting profits through Ireland is scandalous you should check out Royal Dutch Shell and their tax deal. And it's not just the Netherlands that does that, presidential Total does the same. And BP. But please don't think this is limited to oil companies, they're just the biggest fish in the pond. Their profits and payouts make Google look like a children's bank account, and WHO they go to is very telling.
https://www.reuters.com/article/global-oil-tax-havens-idUSKB...
States themselves, the people that make up the state, want to avoid taxes even more than multinationals do. You want this to stop? Your enemies are Royal Families, presidential Families (in France), dynasties in supreme courts of countries in the EU, political parties, ... these sorts of people. When it comes to payouts, by the way, these state companies make FANGs look like children's bank accounts.
And I would like to point out one major difference: these multinational billionnaires have at least done something for us, however ambivalent we may feel about their ethics. Dutch Royals have NEVER dug up any oil or so much as initiated a single green initiative at Shell. They have abused their power to get shares of these companies, and that's the sum total of their contribution. There is no ambivalence about ethics here: the people benefitting from these state cash cow companies have never contributed anything at all to these companies, nor do they intend to.
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.
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.
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-...
I use corruption in the dictionary definition sense. I guess you think that corruption only means bribery.
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.
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.
As for the last of Rutte, I thought that we had seen that one election before the last and yet he's still there.
> 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.
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.
"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".
> “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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Meanwhile, neural nets are accomplishing the great, hitherto-unreachable task of [checks notes] grade school math: https://www.tensorflow.org/datasets/catalog/math_dataset
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.
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...
You would only catch the stupidest, most pitiable people with this trap.
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.)
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.
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.
I also personally blame people who voted VVD and CDA in general, but that is a wider and more personal judgement.
Their honesty about their failure might mean they lose power too soon for a culture shift in the bureaucracy to actually occur.
It is a Dutch documentary, unfortunately without English subtitles:
https://www.2doc.nl/documentaires/series/2doc/2021/alleen-te...
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.
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
This is the real story here. The algorithm is incidental.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
The Australian system was simpler than the Dutch system, comparing social benefits paid with averaged tax-income from the ATO. It was a stupidly wrong calculation, the averaged income is much higher in people with inconsistent income than it actually is, so people were hounded by debt collectors for nonexisting debt. A$1.2 billion false debt for a nation of 25 million people. A good number of associated suicides.
Of course, there was no real accountability, with the system having been introduced by the previous government who is now in opposition. Money has been paid back but everybody involved still has their job.
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.
A student can get €100,000 for child care?
That is amazing.
For me, that is the most surprising thing in the entire article.
If you have several children, the child care allowance adds up — I receive over €1000 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).
I don't see what's 'hostile' about asking people to fill in a form a couple of times per year (at most) for €12k.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some related levity :
Nistoire, professeur de chômage - Groland - CANAL+ :
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.
It's why the Dutch "kan niet"-mentality is so prominent.
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.
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.
[0] - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nadine-dorries-micros...
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.
Bubblesort so dangerous. Not exactly the best headline, is it?
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.
Maybe we should first do a correlation and causality analysis and see what it yields instead of closing our eyes because of PC?
https://www.consultancy.nl/nieuws/39000/pwc-belastingdienst-... (dutch)
> 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?
"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."
Is fraud genetic? I don't think so, so it's only a correlation at most.
Country of origin might cause low income and low social mobility.