By Hans Wilmink
Introduction
Several months before national elections, the Dutch coalition government resigned in January 2021 over what has come to be known as the ‘allowance scandal.’[1] [2] For years, an inhumane and unlawful execution of day-care allowance policies took place, ruining thousands of already vulnerable families. In this blog post, Hans Wilmink of the Professional Honor Foundation briefly summarizes the scandal and formulates several key points for Good civil servant Work.
The day-care allowance scandal
The Netherlands has a relatively wide array of social welfare services, ranging from unemployment benefits, to disabled care, to youth care, to day-care support. However, all these services come with strong surveillance measures that serve to safeguard the spending of tax-payers’ money and ensure honesty and integrity. For day-care, parents are eligible to receive an allowance, provided that they pay a certain amount of the contribution themselves and meet some other requirements.
The Dutch day-care allowance policy came into force in 2005. Parents can get up to 230 hours a month of day-care reimbursed. The exact number of reimbursed hours depends upon others on parents’ number of employment hours. The day-care allowance can count up to large sums of money per family, especially for lower-income families. After the day-care allowance is granted, it is paid either to the parents or to the day-care facility directly. Parents must pay a part of day-care costs themselves as contribution. The amount of that personal contribution depends upon income.
Already since the beginning, strict surveillance had been in place. However, in 2013, after media coverage exposed fraud and misusage of the day-care allowance, public uproar erupted, leading to exceptionally strong surveillance measures of the program. While the scale of the fraudulent practices within government allowances turned out to be relatively small, the strong surveillance nevertheless led to a situation in which even the smallest mistakes were labelled as fraud. Moreover, in those cases labeled as fraud, day-care allowances were all reclaimed from the families that had received them for previous years. Individuals who stood up in protest of this practice, such as a legal advisor who addressed the unlawfulness and injustice of these practices,[3] were overruled and put aside.
In the years that followed – up until 2019 – ten thousands of families with lower and middle class incomes were all of a sudden saddled with ten thousands of euros in debt. The social consequences for many families were devastating, including house eviction, broken relationships, and medical problems.
A parliamentary inquiry commission scrutinized the wrongdoings in the summer of 2020.[4] During public hearings of top civil servants and politicians, including the Dutch prime minister, the politicians themselves expressed shock about the scale of the consequences for families. However, they argued that they had always been unaware of the scope and severity of the scandal.[5] The commission concluded in December 2020 that the very foundations of the rule of law were violated: the three powers of state – the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches of government – did not function as proper checks and balances, keeping each other in check as should be the case in a state governed by rule of law. On the contrary, they strengthened one another in unjust and inhumane actions perpetrated against citizens. The commission’s report led to the Dutch coalition government resignation in January 2021.
The tasks for government
In the Netherlands, this scandal has raised the question of whether policy implementation – especially in social welfare – is too strict and therefore unjust. Two recommendations seem to gain wide acknowledgement:
1) Laws and policies need to leave discretionary space for implementers. After all, not all unique circumstances and contextual factors can be anticipated in the real world.
2) In the implementation of social policies, the principle of proportionality should be abided by. This principle states that a governing body has to try to come to decisions that do justice to all relevant interests, in order to ensure those decisions are lawful and just in the eyes of the citizens involved.
What this means for civil servants: dilemmas and tensions for Good Work?
When discretion of implementation increases, that power is not a freedom that can be used arbitrarily. Instead, it is a responsibility that civil servants need to fulfil professionally, geared towards a righteous and humane delivery of public services. After all, when many tasks and services are orchestrated by the government – as is the case in the Netherlands – expectations are high. Government officials have to respect and abide by the rule of law, ensuring high standards of precision and good governance. Needless to say, the aforementioned principle of proportionality, badly afflicted in the day-care allowance scandal, is one of these standards.
In likely 20,000 cases, families have been disproportionately affected by the reclamation of large sums of money. For example, if a parent paid 500 euros too little in personal contribution, or provided incomplete information, the total sum of allowance received – sometimes reaching ten thousand euros – was reclaimed by government. While a reduction of the allowance and possibly a fine could have served public interest, the total reclamation of funds is out of proportion to the offense, leading to severe and acute financial problems.
Good Work for civil servants according to the Professional Honor Foundation
Large organizations and bureaucracies have a tendency to easily lose sight of individual human cases. This is certainly the case when millions of decisions are involved, as with day-care allowances on the scale of an entire country. Large-scale automation of processes which emphasize technology and systems thinking is inevitable. Tasks and responsibilities of civil servants are split into separate units, causing bureaucratic systems’ behavior. Both civil servants and their managers have a tendency to limit their own engagement and ethical responsibility.
The Professional Honor Foundation strives to promote civil servants’ ‘craftmanship’, using the concepts of the Good Project to counter this allegedly ‘unescapable’ bureaucratic systems behavior. Against the background of the day-care allowance scandal, the foundation formulates six starting points for good civil service work:
Implementation without discretionary space is incompatible with Good Work. Straightforward application of rules does not do justice to complex realities, obstructing Good Work.
Automation is not a goal in itself, but a means that could also be used for Good Work purposes. Automation systems have been used to formulate ‘high risk’-profiles for fraud detection. The same systems can be used to formulate ‘high risk’-profiles for the unintended disadvantaging of citizens. This could help single out special cases that require more attention and care. If necessary, a feedback chain can be organized to report to policy makers, legal advisors, and governors.
Within this Good Work feedback, one should strive for excellence in content and technique. Knowledge about the goal of regulations, the considerations necessary to make decisions, the appropriate principles that are at play, the way systems operate, and skills for feedback is necessary.
Professionals should seek alignment when filling in their discretionary space (by engaging with colleagues, managers, and eventually legislators).
Good Work for civil servants implies aiming for plurality when it comes to engagement and ethical responsibility. This simultaneously serves the organization, colleagues, public service, politics, and society.
Good Work for civil servants requires a form of open accountability for the way civil servants fill in their discretionary space, enabling judicial review at all times.
No policy or act is able take into account all possible circumstances individual citizens or organizations are confronted with. However, implementation has to ensure a legitimate and fair execution of policies. Organizations and civil servants involved in implementation have to apply generic legal frames to concrete and specific cases. The considerations and decisions necessary for that require thorough professional motivation and peer feedback. This can be organized and trained for throughout organizations. It is also possible that new modes of public accountability are necessary for public services. However, successful change requires managerial and political support – or even better: bravery.
About the author
Hans Wilmink (1948) was trained as a sociologist and a senior administrative officer. From 1982, he worked for the ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations fulfilling several positions. Since 2013, he has worked as a volunteer for the Professional Honor Foundation, helping to apply the Good Work Toolkit into Dutch practices with a specific focus on Dutch government. In spring 2020, the Professional Honor Foundation published an essay by Hans titled Beyond angry and careless: a sense of the rule of law as moral compass for government and citizen [title translated from Dutch].
About the Professional Honor Foundation
Group coaching
The Professional Honor Foundation offers group coaching for professionals. The approach – using participants own experiences and cases – appeals to professionals’ intrinsic motivation to strive for good work and challenges professionals to stand for the quality of their work and to do what they deem really necessary. Our central coaching question is: do we do our work right, and do we do the right things? The Professional Honor Foundation has shaped this coaching into two variants: Good Work Trajectories and Good Work Places. Both are based on the valuable insights of The Good Project.
Empirical research
The Professional Honor Foundation empirically examines professionalism, publishing about research in various sectors/professions, including education, healthcare, accountancy, and town clergy.
Keynotes
The Professional Honor Foundation gives keynotes on professionalism and themes like craftmanship, engagement, responsibility, professional pride, integrity, and authority.
Publications
The Professional Honor Foundation publishes books on professionalism, professional honor and good work, often in collaboration with professional practice and science. Published work includes studies on public professionals holding authority, craftsmanship of civil servants, and moral authority of policing.
One edition was published in English: Professional Pride- A powerful force, edited by Thijs Jansen, Gabriël van den Brink & Jos Kole, p. 366, 2010, Amsterdam: Boom Publishing. This book contains the professional Honor Foundation’s mission: Professional Pride as a program - Onwards to a different administrative philosophy.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/world/europe/dutch-government-resignation-rutte-netherlands.html
[2] https://www.government.nl/documents/speeches/2021/01/15/statement-by-prime-minister-mark-rutte-on-the-government%E2%80%99s-resignation
[3] https://www.trouw.nl/binnenland/de-afdeling-toeslagen-zette-de-ambtenaar-die-stop-riep-op-een-zijspoor~bed2f08b/
[4] https://www.tweedekamer.nl/sites/default/files/atoms/files/20201217_eindverslag_parlementaire_ondervragingscommissie_kinderopvangtoeslag.pdf
[5] https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-lodewijk-asscher-labor-leader-tax-office-scandal/