Government to refund over 10,000 students over discriminatory DUO fraud checks

In a landmark decision, the Dutch government has pledged to refund over 10,000 students who were unjustly flagged for student finance fraud by an algorithm developed by the Education Executive Agency. The DUO fraud detection system, implemented in 2012, flagged students based on criteria such as age, education level, and geographic distance from their parents’ residences, an approach shown to unfairly target ethnically diverse students. Despite DUO’s denial of any intentional bias, the agency later admitted an overrepresentation of non-Dutch students in its checks, attributing this discrepancy to systemic flaws rather than explicit racial profiling. An initial warning about possible ethnic profiling in DUO’s fraud checks surfaced in 2020 when attorney Rudolf van der Ham noted that a majority of DUO fraud suspects had non-Dutch surnames. An Amnesty report from March 2024 criticized the Dutch government for not implementing effective safeguards against ethnic profiling, stating that “government organizations have broad powers to monitor people,” a practice that “opens the door to abuse of power and ethnic profiling.” Education Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf, who was involved in earlier assessments of DUO’s methods, previously expressed concerns over the potential for unintentional discrimination.