The latest episode in the twisted series titled ‘The Dutch government is wildly discriminatory, using citizen’s data to seek out social welfare fraud’ has just come out.
To appreciate this latest development, we must briefly turn back to 2014. The start of this rickety Black Mirror-Episode-turned-government-policy was the implementation of Systeem Risico Indicatie (SyRI). This was a government system where an unbelievably broad range of data from agencies such as the tax office, police, municipalities, UVW about whole neighbourhoods were bundled and automatically analyzed with the goal to detect welfare fraud. The participating government agencies came together in the so-called ‘Landelijke Stuurgroep Interventieteams’ (LSI) to decide what specific neighbourhoods will be targeted for such an surveillance operation. In 2020 the court in the Hague ruled that this system and the underlying policy was discriminatory and stigmatizing based on social economic background. See this excellent article by Argos for an overview of these developments.
Despite this legal victory the government continued working in the LSI to surveil poor neighbourhoods, just using different methods. Subsequent reporting by Follow the Money, Argos, and Lighthouse made visible how –again– these projects discriminate, harass, and stigmatize people depending on government assistance (here and here). As we wrote previously:
Risk factors for fraud are for example ‘single mother with the childs father unknown’ or ‘lives together with brothers or sisters’
Following this reporting the ministry responsible for the LSI asked consultancy firm Pro Facto to review LSI’s methods. This report, although finalized in June, was only made public last week. Follow the Money gives a clear overview of its findings: The LSI has insufficiently considered how its projects can discriminate and still fails to provide processes for detecting and acting on problematic projects. The LSI has now suspended its actions and will reevaluate its operations.
If anything, this latest episode once again shows the importance of critical investigative journalism and the apparent deep drive of the Dutch government to use social security as a tool to surveil, discriminate and harass its citizens.
Unfortunately, to be continued…
You can read the full report here (PDF).
See: Bij ‘voorspellen’ fraude in arme wijken hield de overheid geen rekening met discriminatie at Follow the Money.
Image by Wiosna van Bon, from the original article.