The Mandate

Summary

On 13 May 2013, dozens of Belastingdienst employees signed a sub-delegation decision and became officially empowered supervisors. Such a decision is dry paper, a paragraph of law, a signature. But a mandate is also something else: the agreement that you declare your income, share your data and register your children, and that the state will not use that information against you. This essay is about what remains when that agreement breaks. Not about the systems, but about the people who fell through them — and about how they look at each other afterwards.

The mandate as an instrument

In the archive of the Information Point for Childcare Allowance lies the earliest evidence: document L1-001, the sub-delegation decision of 13 May 2013. Dozens of officials are named as Awir supervisors. From that day on, ordinary civil servants could exercise enforcement powers normally reserved for special positions.

The word mandate sounds grand. In practice it is a form. Someone transfers an authority, someone else receives it, and a third checks whether it adds up. In the period we now call the toeslagenaffaire, those forms were issued en masse while the checking lag behind. The mandate shifted from piece of paper to licence.

That is the formal side. There is a second mandate, signed nowhere by anyone.

The mandate nobody signed

Every citizen with an allowance entered an unspoken contract. You tell the state what you earn, where you live, how many hours you work and who your children are. The state gives you childcare allowance, rent allowance, a safety net for when things go wrong. You hand over insight into your life and get certainty back.

That certainty was the product. Not the allowance itself, but the idea that the government would never attack you with the information you had entrusted to it.

Around 2013 that tipped. Citizens with too many blank fields, a second nationality, or a childminding agency under suspicion landed in a machine that presumed guilt. Reclaim everything first, hear the case later, prove innocence if you can. The state used the submitted data as evidence against the very people who had submitted it.

Once inside that machine, you lost the agreement. Not temporarily. For good.

Life with a broken trust

Ask victims how they are doing now and you rarely hear about money. You hear about the post. About the physical reaction to a Belastingdienst envelope on the mat, years after settlement. About no longer opening letters, or leaving them for two weeks until a partner comes home.

You hear about the binder. Under the bed, in the cupboard, in the attic: the complete administration of an entire life, folder after folder, ready for the next fight. People who used to check a bank statement twice a year are now archivists of their own existence. They know where every letter sits. They can date every call with a case officer, because they wrote everything down.

That is not a character trait. That is a wound with a rhythm.

Then you hear about work that stopped working, marriages that did not survive, children who grew to hate their country of birth. About migration: nobody moves from Tiel to Zagreb for the weather. About insomnia, depression, and the joke nobody finds funny anymore: “just report something to the Belastingdienst.”

Compensation payments do not fix this. Money repairs the damage you can invoice. The trust sits somewhere else, in the part of life that knows no invoice.

How victims react to one another

There is no such thing as “the victims”. There are groups, and the relations between those groups say more about the aftermath than any report ever will.

The cohorts. Whoever received a letter in 2009 lived through something different from whoever stood on the CAF-11 list in 2013 or went through the mill via the FSV in 2016. Old-old dossiers, blacklists, “ordinary” recoveries: three histories, each with its own burden of proof and its own pace of recognition. Whoever stayed invisible longest had to fight longest.

The hierarchy of suffering. In closed groups and interest associations a ranking emerged that nobody wanted but everyone knew. Parents with an organ-damage indication above parents without. Families who lost everything above families who “only” knew years of fear. Whoever had a benefit before the scandal, whoever ran a business, whoever held a second nationality — every marker moved your position. Even one’s own suffering gets discussed in the language of more and less.

Recognition as a scarce good. The government long held recognition as something to be fought for, not given. That had a side effect: where recognition is scarce, people compete for it. Then someone else who did receive a payment is no fellow sufferer but a question mark. Why him and not me? The question is understandable and destructive at once.

The mutual distrust. After years of manipulation by the government, victims learned that information is dangerous. In groups, the suspicion surfaces that some members get their information “elsewhere”. Is someone reporting back? Is somebody listening in? To the outside world, paranoia. To anyone betrayed by a system that knew everything, common sense.

Support and attrition. At the same time, those groups are the only thing that works. A case officer who says “your experience” understands nothing. Someone who had the same nightmare understands instantly. Out of that recognition grew practical help: how to file an objection, what to write in an administrative hearing, which deadline applies. But volunteers who spend ten years reading other people’s dossiers burn out. Groups shrink, split, mend, split again.

The groups themselves. Within a few years there were dozens of closed groups: on Facebook, on WhatsApp, for parents, for entrepreneurs, for victims who had left the country. Every group began with the same promise — fellow sufferers, information, one front. Most no longer exist, or go by a different name now. Distrust, discord, feuds, up to open threats. Line up the highlights of those groups and you see more fireworks among themselves than pressure from outside. That is no accident. Once you learn that information is a weapon, you eventually aim that weapon at each other too.

What I went through myself. I was in a group for defrauded entrepreneurs, and in the first research team — Research Hives Bizzy Bees — later succeeded by Research Hives 2.0. Founder: Paula Bouwer, by now the woman who publicly presents herself as the responsible point of contact for defrauded entrepreneurs, and who on Tuesday 14 October 2026 deposited a second petition with the House of Representatives through her interest association Gedupeerde Ondernemers Toeslagen/FSV/MKB. At first I simply shared my research in the group. Later that was no longer allowed: only by personal message, directly to her. Then I started noticing that what I handed her stayed under the table. Not discussed, not passed on. So I left. At the launch of Research Hives 2.0 I was added without being asked, and I still tried, in a phone call, to negotiate openness and honesty for everyone — not for one person. That call went nowhere. Within seconds I was out of that group too.

The phone call. Open criticism of the leadership of those groups is rarely answered in the group itself. The answer comes privately, by phone. Many describe those calls as conversations where slander, insult and intimidation are the subjects rather than side effects. About my own call I can only say it ended without any openness and with my removal. But I hear the same descriptions from too many former members to dismiss them as stray shots. What binds all those stories together is the method: bend or leave. My way or the highway. Many people have experienced that way of communicating first-hand. Everyone in that world has an opinion about how it is run; almost nobody voices it, because almost nobody wants the phone call. And whoever dares the phone call anyway should know this: the core team of four records every conversation, without the other side of the line knowing. Those recordings have already been used against someone, in a negative sense. I am not writing that on a hunch. A fifth person was instructed by that team on which recording equipment to buy, and he explained that to me personally. In that silence, a leadership thrives that nobody elected. The acronym of the interest association — Gedupeerde Ondernemers Toeslagen — members themselves pronounce with a grin as GOD. Jokes do not come from nowhere.

Whose discovery is it. I am an open-source man, heart and soul. An investigative journalist who writes an equivalent piece with my sources fourteen days after my publication: their free choice, and in my view fine. Someone who posts “sources??” under my post in a group so they can pick it up themselves gets those sources. Information belongs to no one. I claim no ownership, only equality — I do not place myself above other victims, and whoever asks for help gets it. One thing I do regret: abuse of that openness. In October 2026 a LinkedIn post appeared about the “Recipe Book” praised in the document De Korte Klap in het gezicht van de systeemfraudeur — “The Short Punch to the Face of the System Fraudster”. “I recently found the ‘Recipe Book’”, the author writes. By then, more than seventy people — many of them former members of exactly those groups — had already located the document, online, in weeks of joint digging. The issue is not the reuse; that is precisely what I stand for. The issue is that the work of many gets presented as a personal discovery. Whoever chooses that should not be surprised when the sharing stops.

The back rooms. Some spokespeople of those groups have contact with Parliament or with the cabinet from time to time. Not all victims — a few. And no report of those conversations returns to the group; what was discussed in The Hague stays within a small, fixed circle. Thus a pilot group of defrauded entrepreneurs exists on whom the approach is tested, while the dossiers and data of áll other entrepreneurs travel along to that table as “knowledge”. And that gatekeeping role works in two directions. Certain people have informed the ministry about negative signals concerning individual victims — and whoever becomes known that way sees their recovery routes and pilot routes shrink. Nobody calls it a blacklist; the effect differs hardly at all from one. Of all scandals, this one should have taught everyone where lists of unwanted persons lead. The victims abroad are never at that table. No invitation, no report. The scandal began with decisions about people who were not at the table; the consultations about the recovery have taken the same shape.

Petition number so-many. Yet another new petition: this time for the victimised child, then for the entrepreneur, shortly after for the victim with a colour and a high debt. Every time a smaller group asking for help, and every time the suggestion that whoever does not fit will get a turn later. I see it differently. We are not black, yellow, green or white. We are victims, one broad group, and we ask one thing: recovery that never has to measure anyone by who lost their home and hearth.

The butcher grades his own meat. What is called recovery now repeats the old power relation. A Gelijkwaardig Herstel Foundation executing the playbook of the Ministry of Finance. (Former) employees of the temporary department DG Herstel Toeslagen telling proudly on LinkedIn how they got to develop the damage frameworks. A perpetrator evading administrative law and buying people off with partial damage payment, while victims’ dossiers shuttle between recovery organisations and boards without the victim having given permission — home, hearth and entire administration exposed. Recovery processes in which (virtual) municipalities demand bank statements and ever more personal data to repair damage that arose years earlier. It is the original mandate in a mirror: make your life transparent, and trust that this time it ends well.

The friction I describe above is no side issue of the scandal. It is the second victim: the social structure that should have existed to absorb the first blow. And where that structure held out, it sometimes took the shape of what it fought — a small circle that decides, and a large group that must wait.

What the mandate costs

Put the costs side by side. On one hand a paid-out amount, an apology letter, a minister’s speech. On the other a life in service of the administration: hours on hold, objection letters, hearings, disciplinary cases, requesting documents, requesting documents again because the first request was “incomplete”.

Nobody compensates those hours. Nobody compensates the lost trust in the GP who passed on the file, the school that reported it, the neighbour who tipped them off. The scandal taught people that anyone can be an informant, and that lesson sticks.

A state that understood this would be careful with new mandates. It would know that every next expansion of powers, every new risk model, every next data link is read by people carrying the memory of what happened last time. Trust arrives on foot and leaves by registered mail.

Frequently asked questions

What is the sub-delegation decision of 13 May 2013?

The earliest known evidence sits in the archive of the Information Point for Childcare Allowance: document L1-001. Dozens of Belastingdienst employees are named as Awir supervisors and could from that day exercise enforcement powers normally reserved for special positions.

What is the second mandate in this dossier?

The unwritten contract between citizen and state: you share your income, your data and your family situation, and the state does not use that information against you. Around 2013 that contract broke. Reclaim everything first, hear the case later, prove innocence if you can.

How do victims react to each other?

In dozens of closed Facebook and WhatsApp groups, at home and abroad. Many groups fell apart through distrust, feuds and threats. Spokespeople talk to Parliament and the cabinet, but reports stay within a small circle. Victims abroad are never at that table.

What does this dossier criticise about the recovery?

The butcher grades his own meat. (Former) employees of DG Herstel Toeslagen developed the damage frameworks, the Gelijkwaardig Herstel Foundation executes the Ministry of Finance playbook, and victims’ dossiers circulate between recovery organisations and boards without the victim’s permission.

Sources

• Sub-delegation decision Awir supervisors, 13 May 2013 — Information Point Childcare Allowance, document L1-001
• The Information Point archive: 6,600 documents and the post office that saw the light — Open Brief
• The personal dossier of the toeslagenaffaire — Open Brief
• LinkedIn post Paula Bouwer on the “Recipe Book” and the Second Petition (14 October 2026)
• Final report Parliamentary interrogation committee childcare allowance (Unprecedented Injustice), December 2020

Related entity: Toeslagenaffaire