Definitely convicted and on the flight of the judiciary, but can extend your passport or driver’s license unhindered at every town hall in the Netherlands. Parking inspectors who signal stolen cars, but are not allowed to pass on to the police.
Divirative Government Commissioner Information Management, Arre Zuurmond, calls the bitter examples of bold bureaucracy and a government that does not have its information management in order. A government too, which, according to Zuurmond, has declared privacy to absolute right, so that fugitive criminals are neatly helped at the town hall and parking attendants on the street are no longer allowed to sound an alarm if they signal a stolen car.
Zuurmond has the government bureaucracy in the Netherlands from within. He was the Ombudsman of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region for eight years, from 2022 chairman of the parent panel that the government advised on the allowance affair and until his illness, in the mid -last year, government commissioner information management. In that position he was instructed to map the information management of all public services.
He calls it in an accompanying letter in his final report to State Secretary Zolt Szabó (Digitization, PVV), “that stolen cars, under the guise of privacy, may not be passed on to the police:” apparently stolen cars have also been entitled to privacy “.
On Tuesday he presented in The Hague that final report as a government commissioner to the State Secretary in the form of a book, Right through order. Government attempts to digitize its information management, he describes as a “post -carriage with an auxiliary motor” and the culture in the government as “bureaucratic, smelly and too much focused on legality, rather than justice.”
According to Zuurmond, executive professionals at government services have given way to bureaucrats who have to achieve objectives, “with an excess of policy and too little room for implementation”. With a range of completely autonomous ministries in The Hague, making “every solution in itself difficult to imagine,” says Zuurmond, “and all consultation structures that go with it, prevent a fast, uniform approach.”
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He has experienced stranded attempts to find out stolen cars or license plates with parking inspectors. As an Ombudsman, he handled complaints from someone from Friesland who received parking fines from Amsterdam time and time again, while he had never been there at those times. Even when it was clear that criminals had forged his license plate, the fines continued to come in. Criminals, it turned out afterwards, who were involved in the murder of the Amsterdam lawyer Derk Wiersum. The flight car with that forged license plate was scanned and fined five times in the month prior to that attack, twice even in the street where Wiersum lived. The police were not informed once.
Those fines were eventually waived. But on Zuurmond question to managers from those parking inspectors what happened to all those signals of forged license plates, the answer was: “nothing.” That was not allowed by the privacy rules and it was not in the job description of the service.
Even before the murder of Wiersum, the municipality of Amsterdam had started a project together with the police and the Public Prosecution Service, so that those signals were picked up. Scans of license plates were linked to data files from the National Road Traffic Agency. “With respect for all privacy rules,” according to Zuurmond. “We did not need to know the name of the owner, alone whether that license plate was forged. That went well for five years, until someone at the National Police called it was not allowed. With the result that nothing is allowed now.” At the end of last year, responsible alderman Melanie van der Horst (D66, Traffic) decided to stop the entire project, because municipalities have no legal investigation task with stolen cars and those files should not be linked.
A more painful example in your letter to the State Secretary are fugitive convicts who can simply go to the town hall for a passport or driver’s license.
“There are around fifty thousand untraceable convicts in the Netherlands. We found out that three hundred of them arrived at the town hall in Amsterdam alone in Amsterdam, without a bell at the civil servant. Nationally it has to be thousands of fugitives who are neatly helped at the town hall.
“We looked at how things can be done differently. The first results, four years ago, yielded the three hundred hits and there was a line with the police. But the project has been stopping for years. When the first results were known, there was everywhere indignation, but not only the then top of the Ministry of Justice. It didn’t fit in their bureaucratic thinking.”
The legal grounds for linking judicial data with that of municipalities is being investigated, then the then Minister for Legal Protection, Sander Dekker (VVD) told the Lower House at the start of the project. But that has yielded little. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice confirms when requested that the project is still, despite the first successes, due to privacy sensitivity and IT problems. Moreover, according to the spokesperson, municipalities did not really want to cooperate.
Breaking through that bureaucracy requires a ‘Sense of urgency’ In the civil service, you write. These two examples illustrate that That feeling is not there?
“Politicians make the assessment of whether a file fits in with their political ambitions for the next four years. That also applies to such an alderman who is about parking checks. That estimates in whether there is a profit to be made in such a file, in a file that is just the question of whether there are their hands in the city.
“We have made bureaucrats from too many official professionals in recent decades. Bureacrats who are sent into the field by their managers. A professional says:” I stand for something and I want room for my manager. But there is no professional managers who can manage that. “
“In a bureaucratic government, information comes in well and fragmented. As a result, no one saw how those 15,000 parents were already in the debts in that allowance affair. Look at youth care. Why are many parents in problematic families also in debt? Because they are in panic and therefore cannot make long -term planning. Then you can also conceive that children’s care.”
Who should break through that bureaucratic culture? The politics or the official top?
“I see people who work far too hard. Directors with irresponsibly full agendas. Because so many unnecessary actions have to be done that things have to go wrong in practice. Most officials want to do the good, but they are so busy with things that do not offer solutions at all.
“Official organizations must reinvent their own identity. With managers who dare to say:“ We are about these files and we are going to do that nicely, with vision and long -term planning. And if there is another political constellation, with others targetsthen we will perform those new political assignments. But while maintaining our own responsibility. ”
Is there an official organization where that cultural change has been made?
“The Central Judicial Collection Agency (CJIB) is such an example. There they have been making a distinction for ten years between people who do not want to pay their fines and those who are not able to do that by the first group is: then you get a collection procedure on your pants. But for the second group, the people who do not have to be able to reside, then it is then after the first collector’s? Central collection organization with an overview of all debts at government agencies.
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