The IRS has certainly plunged thousands of people into financial insecurity by blacklisting them, even if there was no evidence whatsoever that they were committing fraud or wrongdoing.
At 750 households that came on the list, the tax authorities stopped benefits for no apparent reason. Thousands of others were placed under increased surveillance almost immediately without explanation, leaving them in prolonged financial uncertainty.
Read the background story to this news here: Once you were on the blacklist, things could go quickly
This is apparent from an as yet unpublished research by consultancy and accountancy firm PwC into the first part of this FSV list, in which NRC had access. The investigation, which was commissioned by the cabinet, has been circulating at the Ministry of Finance for weeks, but has not yet been sent to the House.
It is striking that the supervisory team that dealt with the files is not the fraud team that became infamous because of the Allowances affair. It is unclear whether citizens who ran into problems as a result of being placed on the FSV list are already eligible for compensation.
One mistake, no debt restructuring
The existence of the so-called Fraud Alert Facility (FSV) was made known at the beginning of 2020 by revelations of RTL News and Fidelity. The system was intended to collect signals of fraud from an early stage, but grew into a register containing the data of an estimated 250,000 citizens.
In practice, even a vague suspicion, a ‘tip’ from an ex-partner or a call from a citizen to inquire about their own allowances could be enough to end up on the list.
The tax authorities switched off the system last year, but it remained unclear how harmful a place on the list could be. This first concrete study shows that the consequences of the list could be enormous.
Because people were placed under supervision, they sometimes had to provide supporting documents for years to prove their entitlement to benefits. That was strict. If they made one mistake, they could be excluded from debt restructuring. For others, the surcharge was stopped the day they were registered in the system, without investigation.
The register contained all kinds of peripheral matters. In about five hundred cases, the researchers sometimes encountered extremely sensitive data in the register: about ethnicity and nationality, medical data, judicial history and rental contracts. For example, Facebook photos – which had to show that a citizen did indeed have an allowance partner, which often entitles them to less allowance – could end up in a file.
Those who had been put on the list by officials were not informed and rarely got off the list. Even after the signal had been processed, a registration almost always remained. Only 21 of all 9,084 registered citizens were removed from the system.
The group of people who were put on the list through the tax authorities’ allowances department and who have now been examined by PwC, are only a fraction of the total. Further research should show what the consequences were for the hundreds of thousands of people who were added to the list through other departments.
Last week, outgoing State Secretary for Allowances Hans Vijlbrief (D66) acknowledged in a letter to the House of Representatives that FSV had had “unacceptable consequences” for some citizens, but did not mention the results of the investigation report. The Ministry of Finance also now says that it is not yet able to comment on the contents of the report. PwC declined to comment either.
Background page 7
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 29, 2021
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source https://pledgetimes.com/black-list-tax-authorities-hit-thousands/
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