With the bullying I refer to the tax service employees celebrating "afpakjesdag" ("taking away day"). It sounds like anything but normal professional behaviour with the citizen's rights in mind. It sounds like bureaucracy gone unchecked, serving its own goals. They also frustrated affected parents by sending them highly censored documents that didn't help them at all. The goals I have to admit were an assumption. But why would they celebrate it as a "win" otherwise?

I didn't know about the court ruling but I would trust that no court would mandate fining innocent people, otherwise there's an even bigger problem. I imagine they overinterpreted or used this as an excuse. The tax office also feels free to ignore laws, like GDPR (AVG) which they were way too late in complying with. So why obey this one so strictly?

I also didn't know that this would now be direct billed no. I don't live in the Netherlands anymore. And I don't have kids so I was never impacted. I just know what I've seen in mainstream media around the time of the inquiry. But it sounds like this should have been done right from the start.

And I think the "omgekeerde bewijslast" should be changed to normal criminal rules of "innocent until proven guilty". This is what I was referring to when saying no changes were made. This particular issue has been addressed by the direct billing but the systemic failures that led to it all running out of control have not been. It could all happen again with some other process.

You clearly know more about the ins and outs of this than me though, and I wasn't aware of the court decision or the direct billing, and only vaguely of the original fraud scandal that led to this. And I have made some assumptions about the goals. I just can't see how else they would have gone this far and celebrated it. I'm sorry for these errors. But I still think this was a serious failure of the system and the fact that a government fell over it shows I'm not the only one.