The tax returns of almost one in four large Dutch companies are not inspected by tax officials, according to research by Trouw and the Groene Amsterdammer.

In 2005, the tax office introduced a new method of ‘horizontal supervision’ in which companies are not inspected if they agree to share more information with officials and if their basic administration appears to be correct.

The system, based on trust rather than mistrust, is aimed at saving time and personnel. According to Trouw, in 2012, 1,620 large firms and 87,000 small and medium sized companies were covered by the new system but this has now risen to 2,000 and 130,000 companies.

At the same time, the number of company books inspected by tax officers went down 12,000 to 26,000 in 2015.

One former senior tax inspector told the paper the new system is ‘naïve and irresponsible’. ‘I have never seen a large company that did not commit fraud,’ Ger Fuchs told the paper.