It's a little bit more complicated than that, it was "the rules said so" and then they just used humans to check if people used the rules. The government at the

It's a little bit more complicated than that, it was "the rules said so" and then they just used humans to check if people used the rules. The government at the time was very hard on fraud after a couple of high-profile fraud cases by immigrants. Mostly Bulgarians falsely claiming welfare Anyway, several ministers and other high officials pressured the welfare department to be hard on fraud, which caused the imposition of harsh fines for minor filing errors. The department also got into a bit of a witch hunt were anyone being investigated for fraud was almost always presumed to be guilty. This, combined with the fact that most of the welfare recipients were not very educated, didn't speak Dutch all that well and/or were under a lot of stress due to being generally economically disadvantaged, led to some big fines levied against people who didn't objectively do all that much wrong. Several of them lost their homes or got deep into debt due to the fines and legal costs. Simply claiming it was "the algorithm said so" skips over all the history about why the rules were written the way they were, and the human errors made along the way.