Dissertation
Invordering door de overheid: de invordering van geldschulden uit herstelsancties onder de Awb
On 17 October 2018, Thomas Sanders defended his doctoral thesis 'Invordering door de overheid: de invordering van geldschulden uit herstelsancties onder de Awb'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. mr. T. Barkhuysen and Prof. mr. M.W. Scheltema.
- Author
- Thomas Sanders
- Date
- 17 October 2018
- Links
- Leiden Repository
This dissertation is about how the government balances the general interest that everyone pays their debts to the government and the interest of the individual citizen not to have to pay that debt. The government must in principle collect money debts arising from sanctions. Otherwise the sanction makes no sense. In addition, taxpayers will be penalized if they are not collected. This study will investigate when, despite this principle, the government is not allowed to collect.
The core of the research question was: under what circumstances does the citizen not have to pay? The researcher focused on a certain type of debt to the government, debts arising from so-called recovery sanctions. This type of sanction is not aimed at punishing someone but only at restoring the situation to what it would have been if no violation had taken place. Consider, for example, the government that discovers that someone is wrongly receiving benefits. Reclaiming the benefit that was wrongly received is not a punishment, but merely restoring the situation to what it was like if the benefit had never been paid.