Tax authorities forgot to give up 84 million euros ICT project

The Tax and Customs Administration has forgotten to pass on an ICT project worth 84 million euros to the government. As a result, the government received an incorrect budget for ICT last year and the costs are actually higher than in 2017.

That is what Interior Minister Kajsa Ollongren says in a letter to the House of Representatives. “Unfortunately, I have found that due to a reporting error by the Tax Authorities on the Rijks ICT Dashboard, incorrect figures have also been included in the Annual Report on Central Government Operations,” she writes.

A major modernization project by the Tax and Customs Administration has not been included in the central government’s ICT budget. It was a project that ‘should bring the computer systems of the Tax Authorities up to date’, a spokesperson told Algemeen Dagblad. That project cost 84 million euros in 2018. The costs were ‘incorrectly not included’, says the spokesperson.

The mistake is extra painful for the government, because last year Minister Ollongren indicated that less was spent on ICT in 2018 than the year before. The amount of EUR 564 million was reported at the time, but in reality that amount was EUR 648 million. That is more than the ICT costs in 2017.