Nobody owned the whole

AAnomaly

On 14 October 2026, UWV stopped its Bemiddelingsservice, a system meant to match job seekers and employers on skills. Five years, about 55 million euros ^{1, 2}. On 29 October, Belgium's Court of Audit published its audit of i-Police: 139.4 million euros, almost double the figure parliament had been given, with 70% of the software licences now useless ⁴. And in The Hague, parliament kept debating the tax authority's data vault: 64 million files, moved there in 2019 as a temporary measure, without structure and without a search function. Files the parliamentary inquiry into the benefits scandal never saw ^{5, 6}.

The three reports use different words for the same thing. The Dutch IT advisory board wrote in February that UWV "could not get a grip on quality" and had limited knowledge of the technology and the algorithms it was buying ³. The Court of Audit found the Belgian police structurally dependent on external consultants, with no clear milestones, so it ordered follow-up work before the pilots were evaluated and lost its leverage over the supplier ⁴. The BDO report on the vault found that nobody knew what was in it, because technical management, content ownership and oversight sat in different units ^{5, 7}. Research on 5,392 IT projects shows why this matters: cost overruns follow a fat tail, and a problem in one component cascades into the rest ⁸.