Cabinet Wants to Catch Up With Dutch Graduates Who Vanish Abroad with Their Student Debts
Some 21,000 former students cannot be found by DUO, costing the Dutch state about €170 million in unpaid debt. A new bill would oblige (former) students to stay reachable and extend the expiry date of debts abroad from five to ten years.
The Dutch state is missing out on around €170 million in student loan repayments because some 21,000 former students have effectively disappeared abroad, the cabinet says in a reporting by NOS. A new draft bill from education minister Rianne Letschert proposes to make it harder for graduates to lose contact with the student finance agency DUO, with the goal of recovering more of those debts.
Rentals in the Netherlands
Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.
Why the bill is coming now
Of the roughly one million people in the Netherlands with an outstanding student debt at DUO, about 21,000 are now living somewhere abroad without a verifiable address, roughly one in fifty. Their combined unpaid debt comes to about €170 million. The figure has more than doubled since the end of 2018, when around 20,000 missing debtors accounted for €76 million. The cabinet expects it to keep rising.
Under current Dutch rules, if DUO has had no contact with a debtor for five years, the part of the debt that should have been repaid in that period (plus any late-payment penalties) expires. People who stay out of reach long enough therefore end up paying only a fraction of what they owe.
Not everyone, the cabinet stresses, is deliberately running off. Many simply forget to update their address with DUO when they move abroad, or assume that registering with a new local authority is enough. Others appear to disappear on purpose. As The Hague has long known, even tracking down the willing is difficult: previous estimates suggested that around 80 percent of unreachable debtors held Dutch nationality, and most were living in nearby countries such as Belgium, Germany or the United Kingdom.
A "reachability obligation"
The most striking change in the draft bill is a new "bereikbaarheidsplicht," a reachability obligation. Students, former students and pupils receiving Dutch student finance would be required to keep DUO supplied with up-to-date contact details, by email, phone and post. Inside the Netherlands, this is already largely automatic thanks to municipal registration. Abroad, however, it is not.
Under the proposal, people who travel a lot, live in unstable conditions, or move between countries would be allowed to nominate a contact person instead, for example a friend or family member. Responsibility for keeping the data current would, however, remain with the borrower.
From five years to ten
The bill would also double the statute of limitations for student debts owed by people who cannot be reached: from five to ten years. Without that change, the cabinet says, "a debtor would simply repay a small part of their student debt simply because they are abroad and unreachable for DUO."
More data exchange with other countries
The third major change would give DUO new powers to ask other governments for the contact details of Dutch student-debt holders. At present, the agency cannot freely approach, say, Belgian or German authorities for a former student's address. The cabinet says it expects the number of countries the Netherlands exchanges such data with to grow. As a side effect, the new rules should make it easier to detect cases where international students collect student finance from two countries at the same time, which is already forbidden but is currently hard to check.
According to the cabinet, exchanging data is also less heavy-handed than the only real instrument DUO has today: so-called "paspoortsignalering," whereby a debtor's Dutch travel document can be refused or invalidated if their unpaid student debt is large enough. That measure, the cabinet writes, "can sometimes be disproportionate."
What happens next
For now, the bill is not yet before parliament. It has been published online in an "internet consultation," a phase in which members of the public, organisations and experts can submit comments before the proposal is formally introduced into the Tweede Kamer.
If adopted, the new rules would change a long-standing reality for Dutch graduates: that moving abroad and going quiet has, until now, been a fairly effective way to outrun part of a student loan.
