Rotterdam Welfare Fraud Risk Algorithm

Rotterdam’s Analytics Uitkeringsfraude project used a risk model to help select recipients for review. In a 2021 parliamentary answer, the Dutch government relayed the municipality’s account: the model estimated risk from historical benefit-administration data; recipients could then be invited to a conversation, and an employee assessed legality. The municipality said it did not autonomously establish fraud and described training as a human-run process using historical investigations and held-out records. A score can still shape who faces scrutiny. The Rotterdam Court of Audit’s 2021 report “Gekleurde technologie” identified governance and transparency gaps. It said citizens had little ability to understand how the algorithm affected selection and warned that proxies such as low literacy could create biased outputs. The audit did not investigate whether outcomes had in fact been unfair. The government response acknowledged that indirect relationships with protected characteristics can produce bias and cited speaking ability as a possible proxy for origin or ethnicity. These are documented risks, not a finding that every group was discriminated against. A 2023 investigative team published code and described acquiring a trained model and records. Its repository documents a 315-feature artifact and controlled profile perturbations. These tests speak to that recovered version and chosen profiles; they do not estimate all recipients’ error rates or prove a legal violation. The Court of Audit also found the municipality had not adequately evaluated whether the model outperformed older methods or what impact it had. The register entry “Heronderzoeken Uitkeringsgerechtigden” dates a selection algorithm January 2017–February 2022 and marks it stopped early 2022. Its period and selection function align with the older Analytics Uitkeringsfraude project, but do not prove this register record is the recovered code artifact. The Court of Audit’s 2024 follow-up separately says development of a successor re-examination risk model began January 2022 and paused in 2023. The register is not identified as that successor. A score alone established no fraud.