Blue tax office envelopes set to be phased out

Monday 06 February 2012

The tax office is looking into phasing out its traditional blue envelope and moving to digital post, the Volkskrant reports on Monday.

The tax office currently sends out 160 million letters a year, but a change in the law could reduce that to tens of millions, the ministry says. The law currently requires all official notifications to be on paper.

However, information about grants and subsidies, such as housing or child benefit, could be easily dispatched digitally. There would be guarantees built in for people without a computer or who have difficulty using one, the ministry said.

Cutting the volume of mail by 50 million letters a year would save the taxpayer €95m, the tax office calculates. The department has been ordered to find €395m in cuts as part of the government’s cost reduction programme.

© DutchNews.nl

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