Yes it's "lucrative", and there's certainly fraud involved. But the tone of comment (and certainly the rest of this thread at large) seems to be losing sight of

Yes it's "lucrative", and there's certainly fraud involved. But the tone of comment (and certainly the rest of this thread at large) seems to be losing sight of how lucrative it is for everyone involved. If you have a child in The Netherlands you're entitled to a daycare subsidy. The subsidy is the same whether you send your kid to the daycare down the road, or if you pay a "gastouder kantoren". It should be obvious how the likely signs of "fraud" in this case are highly correlated with saving the state money overall. If you're paying one of your parents to take care of your kids that's usually win-win, if they weren't getting that income they might in turn be eligible for other poverty subsidies from the state. The overhead of paying a "real" daycare is also going to be much higher in administrative overhead etc. The average daycare worker is also likely to be of an age and inclination (given that they've accepted a job taking care of the kids of strangers) to be otherwise productive elsewhere in the economy, which is less likely to be the case with parents willing to act as a "gastouder kantoren". So cracking down on this in particular seems to me to be at least partially a case of penny wise pound foolish, which the Dutch are otherwise pretty good about avoiding. This system can absorb a lot of fraud before it would become less beneficial overall than the alternative.