[eesmith]

It's shocking to read, and reminds me of the British Post Office scandal.

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.

[Cthulhu_]

On top of these fines they have to compensate and pay damages to everyone involved though, they've reserved €1.3 billion for that. The issue affected 30.000 parents, 70.000 children; there were 8000 divorces.

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.

[jacquesm]

Quite a lot of the damage is irreparable through monetary compensation. Children placed in institutions or with adoptive families because their parents ended up being destitute for instance. Suicides.

[candiodari]

You can compensate lost years. A lot year costs the victim that year in

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.

[jacquesm]

Yes, and besides it is the one government institution fining another, so there is really no consequence for any of this.

[justin_oaks]

It kills me when government institutions get fined as a punishment. It's just the tax payers that are being punished.

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.

[iostream24]

Yes!!! Exactly and precisely this. The actual individuals should be accountable for decisions they made that ruined other peoples lives for wrongful cause.

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.

[jacquesm]

They don't even lose their jobs. 'Just following orders'...

[smaudet]

> I don't see how regulating algorithms and AI could affect those institutional injustices.

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.

[eesmith]

In my reading, people aren't saying the tax office corrupt, but rather that it was illegally discriminatory. Eg:

> 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.

[cool_dude85]

Do two wrong things, when the regulators come down on one of them, point to the other and say "I don't see how this regulation could affect the real cause, over there." Good trick if you can pull it off.