Ingrid is one of the parents whose life was turned upside down by the childcare benefits scandal. Even after being recognized as a victim, she didn’t receive proper help and “the light went out”. The government promised improvements for other parents on Friday.
It is 2021 when the letter with apologies from Prime Minister Mark Rutte lands on the doormat of Ingrid’s* now neglected house. “Apologies”, it says in large red letters. “You are not a fraudster with childcare benefits.”
“What was I supposed to do with it?”, Ingrid says cynically four years later. “Frame it?”
She has then endured eleven years in which the Tax Authorities have treated her as a fraudster. In 2011, she receives letter after letter, and eventually a direct debit form for more than 100,000 euros. “As if I wanted to pay within two weeks. I couldn’t even take it seriously.”
But the government is indeed serious. “At one point I was in the supermarket and couldn’t use my card anymore. The Tax Authorities had seized my account,” Ingrid recounts. Her salary is also seized, causing the office manager to change jobs more and more often to shake off the Tax Authorities.
Friends and family doubt her story
Ingrid lives in a small, remote village with her husband and two daughters, who are zero and five years old when the misery breaks loose. The car has to go and they can no longer go to the dentist.
Her environment sometimes doubts her innocence during that period. “If I had cheated with numbers, I could just tell them, people said to me.” The distrust she feels causes Ingrid to no longer trust anyone. The weekly visits to her parents become fewer and fewer.
She is ashamed of how badly things are going. “At home, the mask only came off.” At home, where she types sex chats for 10 cents per conversation at the kitchen table to get money. “How low can you sink?”, she says about it now.
‘I was mentally a wreck’
After Ingrid receives apologies from the government, she initially receives an amount of 30,000 euros. “I told it to my oldest daughter who was studying. Angrily, she threw her stapler across the room. As if she got her youth back because of it.”
“Of course we needed money to be able to make a fresh start, but that wasn’t going to make it right,” says Ingrid. The house is neglected, her teeth are falling out. The two daughters still suffer from the years that the family lived in stress.
“When I received recognition that I was not a fraudster, I could get out of survival mode,” says Ingrid. “Then the light went out.” She gets a burn-out and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “I was mentally a wreck.” Ingrid continues to fight with a lawyer to get the last pennies back from the government. But that’s not enough.
“Three years after Rutte’s letter, I still had not been heard and helped further by the government,” she says. “I lost all confidence in a good outcome and didn’t want to wake up anymore.” With a bottle of Jägermeister and pills, she attempts to take her own life. Her oldest daughter and her husband see her lying on the stairs.
Parents have been waiting far too long
Princess Laurentien wanted to offer parents like Ingrid a listening ear with the Foundation (Equal) Recovery (SGH). Ingrid applies to the damage route, which has now officially become so. “I was the most skeptical parent they had seen here.”
She tells her whole story for the first time, which helps her enormously. “I finally understood why I had changed from a vibrant woman into a pitiful heap of misery. That was not only in the wage garnishment, but also in all the consequences of it. If I hadn’t been able to tell my story, I wouldn’t be like this now.” The amount of money she eventually receives matters less to her.
She now works for the SGH herself. Ingrid helps other victims and leads ceremonies where parents and the government sign off on the completion of their process.
“Parents have been waiting far too long,” she says. “They are already five years further since Rutte’s apology letter and they are still in the shit. We have never referred so many people to 113 (the phone number for people who are thinking about suicide, ed.).”
Responsible outgoing State Secretary Sandra Palmen (Allowances) informed the House of Representatives on Friday that the government will work with two counters to help parents. The SGH is one of them. The second, called MijnHerstel, opens in September.