The Dutch tax office has a motto, which in English translates to “We can’t make it more pleasant, but we can make it easier”. And everytime they screw up – which has been a lot in 2008 so far – the media make fun of this ‘the road to tax hell is paved with good intentions’ slogan. Major computer problems have been their biggest worries, never mind that some staff are, well, incompetent.
The tax folks have sent a tax return to a three-year-old child, saying that they should provide them with their bank account number in order to get tax money back from 2004. The child was born in 2005, so you do the math.
This kind of mistake happens often. As a business, I recently waited for two separate returns of value added tax (small amounts, mind you) that I was owed. I got three letters telling me they all of a sudden could not find my bank details – which is rubbish, I assure you – and to fill in these three forms, all identical. The first return had two letters and the second one had one. I received the first return twice – they haven’t figured that out yet – and the second one once.
Here’s one (in Dutch) from March of a 6-year-old who was asked to cough up EUR 29,000.
(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)
Contributing text to Wikipedia is as easy as clicking on the “Edit this page” link at the top of an entry. But contributing photos is harder. To write text about Leeuwarden, you don’t have to be there, but to take a photo of Leeuwarden you do. The quality of a text is only limited by your own skills, but that of a photo also by the quality of your equipment. And finally, your text is your own, but who owns a photo is also dependent on what’s in the picture.
Last Tuesday a man won 980,000 euro in a poker game at the Holland Casino in Rotterdam. The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, played a relatively rare variant of the game called Caribbean Stud Poker in which part of the winnings go into a jackpot. A royal flush managed to help pry loose the contents of this jackpot. 
