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The tax office has a long history of (privacy) abuse, law breaking, and going after after the "little" people with no way to defend themselves. Some of the not-so-savory/unlawful recent abuses I recall:
- Going after "all" the rent allowance fraudsters that were, according to them, undermining and abusing the system.. Result: recovery effort dropped after it turned out the cost of running the fraud task force was an order of magnitude higher than what was recovered from the people defrauding the system..
- Illegally storing and going through millions of traffic camera images to go after fraudsters driving a few kilometres more than they declared. Result: stopped by the supreme court, on ground of unlawful privacy abuse.
- Cross governmental agencies checks & cross database checks of different expenditures (heating, rent, telephone bills, online shopping etc) to make sure that some low-income families were not earning more than declared. Also declared unlawful. The theme is recurrent: an abuse of power, and a propensity to break the law to extort money from lower class incomes mostly, as they are the least capable of pushing back. The motives are unclear, but, fundamentally, the problem originates in a political will and ingrained mentality of distrust of their fellow citizens -especially the poor- and blaming them for not contributing to the taxation effort. Very ironic coming from a fiscal paradise. Even more ironic when you know that, until recently, Shell could write-off world-wide expenses as local loses, and thereby not pay taxes in the Netherlands. Well, Shell left for London, so at least that problem is solved. |