Even though the Dutch tax office (the Belastingdienst) was advised to immediately stop the use of three risk profiling algorithms, the office decided to continue their use, according to this reporting by Follow the Money.
An internal memo concluded that the Belastingdienst’s algorithms don’t fulfil the basic requirements of the European privacy law, that they carry a risk of illegal discrimination, and that they can’t explain in a satisfactory manner why they consider certain SMEs to be a risk.
The Belastingdienst however, considers the algorithms to be necessary to do its work in an affordable manner, so it decided to ignore the advise in the memo and turn the algorithms back on.
The arguments for doing that? They don’t seem to have any.
Did they at least check whether their algorithms contained any bias? Nope, they didn’t.
Have they learned any lessons from the child benefits scandal? Apparently not.
See: Belastingdienst blijft wet overtreden met mogelijk discriminerende fraude-algoritmen at Follow the Money.
Image by Luca van der Vossen from the original Follow the Money article.