Supervision and enforcement: slipping through the net
12½ years of audits identify common shortcomings
Lawbreaking damages society in a variety of ways, including, for example, through violence in the youth care system, serious industrial accidents, cocaine dealing and healthcare fraud. This, in turn, results both in victims and in financial losses, which are estimated to be considerable in the case of the Netherlands. It is clearly very much in the country’s interests, therefore, to seek to reduce lawbreaking.
How citizens, businesses and government organisations behave is determined by whether compliance with rules and regulations is properly supervised, as well as by whether and how those rules and regulations are enforced in the event of infringements or, in some cases, criminal offences. The Netherlands Court of Audit’s focus on this occasion is on the quality of supervision and enforcement.
To this end, the Court of Audit compared 54 reports from 2013-2025 so as to identify any patterns in supervision and enforcement. These reports examined various policy areas – such as the societal domain, the living environment, financial markets and the judicial service – and various forms of supervision and enforcement, including central government inspections, market supervision and criminal law. Based on these 54 reports, we identified four central issues indicative of recurrent shortcomings. These are:
- Low detection rate for serious offences: the number of offences investigated and measures implemented is far lower than the estimated number of offences committed;
- Inadequate exchange of information: supervisors and enforcers often lack the information they need to perform their tasks properly;
- Unclear choices: in practice, it is not always clear who is being investigated and whom measures are targeting;
- Insufficient insight into effectiveness: supervisors and enforcers themselves are often unaware of whether and to what extent their work contributes to the societal goals that have been set.
Based on the same 54 reports, we also outline various opportunities for improvements. These include:
- Ensuring a statutory basis for sharing information wherever necessary and appropriate, assessing the balance between the importance of supervision and that of privacy at an early stage, and focusing on opportunities for sharing information rather than on restrictions;
- Setting specific and measurable supervisory and enforcement objectives, per policy theme, when seeking to reduce the number of infringements and offences committed. These objectives should serve as indicators for assessing the effectiveness of supervision and enforcement.
This is a summary of the report published in Dutch.