SyRi - Detect welfare fraud

Various municipalities in the Netherlands have been using the SyRi system to detect welfare fraud more effectively. SyRi has been developed by the Dutch government and uses various risk indicators from existing governmental systems such as taxes, health insurance, residence, education and many more, in order to detect which addresses hold a higher risk of fraud or misuse of welfare benefits. SyRi was developed in 2014 after multiple municipalities had been creating their own systems to detect fraud. To enable the sharing of different information items that are relevant for SyRi, the system operates on a legal basis which clearly indicates which kind of data can be captured, stored and shared.The system does not make any decisions itself, but provides recommendations for civil servants to conduct further investigations. Various organisations have opposed the usage of the system. They argue that it causes too many privacy infringements and is discriminatory towards the poor and vulnerable citizens. The lack of transparency on the inner working of the system and the inability of the people affected to get to know their data have been used, has been criticized as well. The UN-rapporteur for Human Rights also expressed his concerns on the use of SyRi as it could be a significant threat to human rights. Some projects revealed significant difficulties in integrating various data sources, which caused the recommendations by the system to become outdated and in fact unusable. In municipalities where the system actually gave recommendations on possible fraudulent behaviour, the success rate was very low. As, the costs of SyRi have been estimated to be over 325.000 euro per year, so that many have been wondering whether the system was worth the privacy and financial costs at all. Following a court case, the Dutch court decided in early 2020 that the use of SyRi did not comply with Article 8 of the ECHR (European Convention of Human Rights), thus its usage has been cancelled. The judge ruled that the collective, economic welfare interest of preventing fraud weighed insufficiently against the social interest of privacy. Furthermore, the absence of disclosure about the inner working of SyRi makes its usage insufficiently transparent and verifiable.