Tax Department employees regularly copy and paste citizen service numbers (BSN) of deceased people. This violates the rules because it must be done manually. As a result, it happens that people receive a notification that they have to file inheritance tax returns from people they do not know. The tax authorities have reported this to the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
Every year, the Inland Revenue receives some 180,000 death notifications. To process these in the computer systems, the deceased person's BSN number must be entered several times. Officials are not allowed to copy and paste BSN numbers, but must type them out manually. In practice, however, it frequently happens that BSN numbers are copied via copy-paste. As a result, an incorrect BSN number sometimes ends up in an estate.
One example is when a woman from Grave in Brabant received a letter from the Tax Office after the death of her mother. She was summoned to file an inheritance tax return. Not for her deceased mother, but for someone she did not know at all. Investigation revealed that the tax authorities had used the wrong BSN number.
That wasn't the only thing that went wrong. When Hermine called the IRS, she was misinformed. And appointments to call back were often not kept.
How often it goes wrong with copying and pasting wrong BSN numbers, a spokesman for the Tax Administration cannot say. Figures on this are not kept. The spokesman points out that employees are made aware of how to handle privacy-sensitive data. The use of copy-paste is not allowed.
According to the spokesperson, it cannot be completely prevented from happening anyway. Officials caught copying and pasting BSN numbers are given a call. How often it went wrong last year is unknown. The Tax Authority confirms to the Algemeen Dagblad that it reported a data leak because BSN numbers ended up with third parties.
From mail-related leaks to accidental destruction of files. From employees inadvertently accessing job seekers' privacy-sensitive information to files sent to the wrong people. In recent years, hundreds of such incidents have occurred at government organizations such as the UWV, DUO and the tax authorities.
Two years ago, the Ministry of Finance investigated data breaches at the Tax Administration. Investigators formulated recommendations to reduce the number of errors. According to the spokesman, these have all been followed up. Where necessary, they are being revised. "It is being investigated how to better monitor the effectiveness of the measures taken," he said.
