Dutch government resigns over child welfare fraud scandal - RESPECT!

[stockhausen]

Mark Rutte's government has stepped down after thousands of families were wrongly accused of child welfare fraud and told to pay money back.

Families suffered an "unparalleled wrong", Dutch MPs decided, with tax officials, politicians, judges and civil servants leaving them powerless.

Many of those affected were from an immigrant background and hundreds were plunged into financial difficulty.

"Innocent people have been criminalised and their lives ruined," he then told reporters, adding that responsibility for what had gone wrong lay with the cabinet. "The buck stops here."

Politicians behaving honourably - who would have thought it?

The fact that this was not exactly down to Mark Rutte's Government but largely down to tax officials, politicians, judges and civil servants makes this honourable decision even more admirable.

 

[potatolord]

Obvious scam.

Now they're unemployed they'll all be claiming benefits.

 

[FoxEye]

It's something of a token gesture is it not? They're staying on in government, and they're virtually guaranteed to get re-elected.

Politicians are good (mostly) at knowing how to appear as sheep, even after they've just left a bloody mess tearing through the chicken coop

 

[ianh]

For me it would have been better if they'd vowed to punish every one of the "tax officials, politicians, judges and civil servants" who allowed such suffering to occur in the first place, showing that the "I was just following the rules even if they had terrible consequences" mentality they all held just isn't an allowable excuse in the modern world, something I'd hoped wouldn't have been forgotten so easily considering Holland's position as an occupied nation during WW2 plus the failure of that excuse during the subsequent Nuremberg trials.