Acknowledging what happened does not guarantee that it will never happen again. But it’s a start nonetheless.
Nothing goes by itself in the Allowance affair. At first it took a long time before the signals about serious abuses got through to the media. When two media, Fidelity and RTL News, but it took a long time for the ministries of finance and social affairs to stop with stubborn denials and obstructions. Subsequently, there were so many overlapping studies that it still took a long time before the whole story about the benefit parents was revealed. And for the recognition of one aspect of this, that people are disadvantaged because of their origin, it took until Monday for the cabinet to speak out: yes, racist prejudice has played a structural role in carrying out tax audits.
That recognition has long been complicated by hesitations about the meaning of the term ‘institutional racism’. Only when State Secretary Van Rij was able to assure the House that in this case it could also be unintentional racism, did he dare to take it. There were also hesitations about the implications: can a Tax and Customs Administration still function if it is no longer allowed to go after targeted signals of fraud in specific target groups?
While that is a logical question, it still pollutes the debate. The Tax and Customs Administration is of course allowed to conduct targeted investigations. If there are signs tomorrow that lease drivers or owners of second homes are committing fraud on a large scale, no one will protest if extra checks are carried out. What is not allowed, however, is to involve people in such investigations on the basis of personal characteristics without any other concrete indication that something is wrong with them. And that has happened because of the so-called black lists: tax returns of persons with a non-Dutch background were more often picked out for extra checks.
The breach of trust that many people will now feel with the tax authorities as a result is incalculable. This applies not only to the victims, but to entire sections of society who assumed that the government was a reliable partner. This will take years to heal. ‘Extremely painful’, concludes Van Rij himself.
That conclusion is inevitable. As well as the frequently asked question what the victims actually gain from this. Van Rij will continue to breed on this in the coming weeks. For the time being, the significance of this recognition mainly lies in the fact that the government states so clearly that something like this should never happen again. That’s not a guarantee, but it’s a start.
The position of the newspaper is expressed in the Volkskrant Commentaar. It is created after a discussion between the commentators and the editor-in-chief.