Association of civil servants at the tax authorities files a declaration against BOOS ANP
The NCF trade union is filing a complaint against the BNNVARA program BOOS, chairman Albert van der Smissen confirms after a report from Trouw. According to the chairman, “colleagues who work at the tax authorities are threatened and intimidated.” Presenter Tim Hofman called on people a few days ago to share data from officials who misbehaved for a broadcast about the allowance affair.
“That is prohibited in the Netherlands,” says the chairman of NCF, the trade union for employees of the Tax and Customs Administration and the Ministry of Finance. “Tim Hofman has made an appeal on behalf of BOOS to share data from tax officials with them, so that these people can ‘be tried’ for the allowance affair, so to speak. People who are employed and do their job,” says Van der Smissen.
According to the chairman of the association, personal data should not be shared just like that. “Just as you are not allowed to request the data from the police in private in the Netherlands, we also think that this is not possible now.”
BNNVARA says in a response that “BOOS has been conducting an investigation for some time into the Tax Authorities and officials who allegedly violated rules. The editors have seen documents showing that there are officials who have broken rules and have worked outside the protocol. Our question is: how did the tax authorities deal with these people?”
Hofman and his team want to know whether there are consequences to this and what positions these people are currently occupying. According to BNNVARA, BOOS does not intend to publish the list of officials involved. “Names will only be mentioned if there is sufficient reason to do so and this is also journalistically responsible.”