The Dutch administration and justice are now completely overwhelmed by the scale of the “benefit affair”, a scandal which, for around ten years, unfairly penalized thousands of parents, wrongly accused of benefit fraud. family. The courts are seized of 9,300 appeals against the authorities and some 500 new cases are opened each month. The injured families would officially number 68,000.
In recent judgments noted by the newspaper De Volkskrant, the courts of Rotterdam and Utrecht, among others, denounced the situation, unmanageable according to them, created by the government and Parliament. Families often contest the amounts awarded to them in compensation, hence the backlog of the courts and the administration responsible for assessing the damage they have suffered. If the compensation service does not make a decision on an appeal within two weeks, it must pay the claimants compensation of around 1,400 euros. If it does not succeed after twelve weeks, the plaintiffs can take legal action and the courts have eight weeks to decide. If, in turn, they do not succeed – which is increasingly common – the compensation to be paid to the plaintiffs can reach 15,000 euros.
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