Johannes Alexander "Hans" Vijlbrief (born 17 August 1963) is a Dutch politician currently serving as the minister of social affairs and employment for the social-liberal party Democrats 66 (D66). He previously served as a state secretary in the Fourth Rutte cabinet.
Vijlbrief started his career at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, after earning his doctorate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 1992. Subsequently, he worked at the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) before returning to Economic Affairs, where he filled several positions as director and director-general. Vijlbrief was appointed Treasurer-General of the Ministry of Finance in 2011, and occupied that post until he became president of the advisory body Eurogroup Working Group six and a half years later. He had been a member of that group while serving as Treasurer-General, assisting Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem.
Just after he had been re-elected at the working group, Vijlbrief was appointed State Secretary for Finance together with Alexandra van Huffelen in January 2020. He succeeded Menno Snel, who had resigned as a result of the childcare benefits scandal, and became responsible for the Tax Administration and tax affairs. Vijlbrief was elected to the House of Representatives in 2021, but he left this position upon his appointment as State Secretary for the Extractive Industries as part of the new fourth Rutte cabinet in January 2022. He was again elected to the House in November 2023, and his term as state secretary ended in July 2024.
Early life and education Vijlbrief was born on 17 August 1963 in Voorschoten, a village in South Holland close to Leiden. His father, Johan, was a sales manager at beverage company Riedel and would later found his own bottler.
He attended the high school Visser 't Hooft Lyceum in Leiden, earning his atheneum diploma in 1981. Thereafter, he studied at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam where he obtained an MSc degree in general economics in 1987. He continued studying at the university, receiving his PhD in economics in 1992. His dissertation was titled Unemployment insurance and the Dutch labour market.
Early career After obtaining his doctorate, Vijlbrief started working at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, where he filled a number of positions at the directorate General Economic Policy. Minister Hans Wijers appointed him as interim director of that division in 1997. Besides, he became director at Erasmus University Rotterdam of the Research Centre for Financial Economic Policy, a part-time job, the next year.
He left the Ministry to work as deputy director at the Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) in 1999. Vijlbrief has told that he later came to regret the move, calling the agency "too quiet" and lacking in pressure. He also became an endowed professor in 2000 at the Vrije Universiteit, his alma mater, specialized in economic policy, and he simultaneously quit his job in Rotterdam.
Vijlbrief returned to the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2001 in the position of director of General Economic Policy. In July 2004, Minister Laurens Jan Brinkhorst promoted him to Director-General for Economic Policy. While in this position, Vijlbrief also chaired a re-evaluation group called "Security and Terrorism" (2009–2010).
Starting in February 2010, he served as Director-General for Energy, Telecommunications, and Markets. Vijlbrief's former position was subsequently eliminated. Its responsibilities were transferred to the secretary-general (general economic policy and EU matters) and his new job (competition and consumer policy). His professorship at the Vrije Universiteit came to an end that same year. Vijlbrief, who had been a member of D66 since 2008, also became more politically involved, helping write the party's election program for the 2010 general election. Moreover, Vijlbrief led Maria van der Hoeven's successful campaign to get appointed Executive Director of the International Energy Agency in 2011.
Treasurer-General and Eurogroup Working Group (2011–20) Vijlbrief served as the Treasurer-General of the Ministry of Finance starting in July 2011, after he was appointed by the Council of Ministers. His predecessor, Ronald Gerritse, had vacated the position when he became chairman of the Authority for the Financial Markets. The position also included membership of the Eurogroup Working Group (EWG), an advisory body responsible for preparing the monthly meetings of the Eurogroup. Besides, Vijlbrief was chairman of the Economic Policy Committee, a European advisory body, between 2012 and 2014.
In his position at the Eurogroup, Vijlbrief worked for a number of years together with Jeroen Dijsselbloem, when he was Minister of Finance and President of the Eurogroup, on handling the Greek and European debt crises. He also managed the two campaigns to get Dijsselbloem elected Eurogroup president. In March 2014, Vijlbrief was chosen to chair the board of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the eurozone's emergency fund to address government debt. He had been a member of the body's board since 2011 and was also serving on its Risk Committee. That same month, Vijlbrief became a member of the board of the European economic think tank Bruegel. During the 2017 Dutch general election season, he was a co-author of D66's election program.
Vijlbrief left the ministry, the EFSF, and Bruegel in 2018 to become the President of the Eurogroup Working Group starting on 1 February, succeeding Thomas Wieser. He was elected by the members of the EWG in December after his candidacy had received support from the Dutch cabinet and his only opponent had withdrawn. The decision was later ratified by the Eurogroup itself. Vijlbrief simultaneously became president of the Economic and Financial Committee. While leading the EWG, he unsuccessfully worked on creating a common European deposit insurance. Vijlbrief also started working as endowed professor at the University of Amsterdam specialized in European economic and financial policy in September 2018. When his two-year term as president was about to end, Vijlbrief was reappointed for another term in December 2019.
State Secretary for Finance (2020–22) After State Secretary for Finance Menno Snel resigned in December 2019, it was made public on 26 January that he would be succeeded by Vijlbrief and Alexandra van Huffelen. Snel resigned after thousands of recipients of childcare benefits had been wrongfully considered fraudsters and had been forced to pay back the money. Some of them had received mostly blacked out pages after they had asked for their records. Weeks before Vijlbrief and Van Huffelen were put forward, Minister of Finance Wopke Hoekstra had decided that benefits () and customs would be spun off from the Tax Administration.
Vijlbrief was sworn in as "State Secretary for Finance - Tax Affairs and the Tax Administration" by King Willem-Alexander at palace Huis ten Bosch on 29 January. His colleague, Van Huffelen, became in charge of benefits and customs. Vijlbrief became responsible for tax affairs; Tax Administration (including the FIOD); financial relations between the national government and decentralized governments; export credit insurance and facilities; Holland Casino and the Dutch Lottery; currency; and Domains Movable Property. He is also in charge of working out plans for aviation and carbon taxes. Simultaneously with his appointment, he resigned from his positions at the Eurogroup and the University of Amsterdam. Shortly before his term started, Vijlbrief declared that he was planning "to make the Tax Administration boring again".
Taxation One week after his appointment as State Secretary, Vijlbrief announced that the organization would start working with construction and health care trade associations in order to tackle pseudo self-employment. He also said that the organization would work with trade associations in other sectors later on. Vijlbrief's aviation tax on all plane tickets passed the House of Representatives in April 2020.
In June, he announced that he would not follow through on his predecessor's plan to overhaul the savings and investment tax system, calling the plan legally untenable. Snel wanted to tax savings and investments based on their respective expected returns, causing taxes on savings to decrease and taxes on stocks and other investments to increase. A year later, after an investigation, Vijlbrief advised the next cabinet to change the savings and investment taxes such that they reflect actual returns.
The Tax Administration announced in May 2020 that it would introduce a new tax on dividends in 2024 in order to counter tax avoidance. After the cabinet's resignation in 2021, Vijlbrief advocated introducing a code of conduct to fight tax avoidance by multinationals. Besides, he said that he welcomed the European Commission's more ambitious agenda concerning the issue and that he approved of a deal in the run-up to the 47th G7 summit to commit towards a global minimum corporate tax rate.
Childcare benefits scandal At the end of February 2020, Trouw and RTL Nieuws reported that the Tax Administration had been using a blacklist containing the names of about 180,000 suspected fraudsters called the . An internal report had concluded one year earlier that the list violated privacy legislation. The plug was pulled on the blacklist after journalists had obtained the report – days before the news articles were published. Vijlbrief sent a letter to the House of Representatives disclosing the blacklist two days after it had been revealed. He also told the House that officials at the Tax Administration had unjustly blacked out a paragraph about the blacklist in a document that the organization had been forced to disclose earlier in order to cover up the story. Vijlbrief's predecessor had repeatedly denied the existence of such a list. Vijlbrief called the list an unpleasant surprise and called the problems of the Tax Administration "enormous". In the surrounding weeks, he had to inform the House about a number of other issues concerning the organization; the Tax Administration had not paid back wrongful reminder fees, there had been small mistakes in the calculation of two tax rates, and the organization had failed to collect debts before becoming statute-barred.
In May 2020, Vijlbrief and Van Huffelen filed a criminal complaint for official misconduct against the Tax Administration they lead in reaction to the childcare benefits scandal. They alleged that civil servants had knowingly collected money from citizens who did not owe money and that they had discriminated on the basis of race. In addition, four high-ranking officials were asked to step aside. The public prosecutor's office later announced that it would not conduct a criminal investigation despite the criminal complaint. When Trouw and RTL Nieuws reported in July that the Tax Administration had wrongfully labeled citizens paying income tax as fraudsters based on suspicions, Vijlbrief and Van Huffelen temporarily shut down the registration systems for fraud.
An investigation concluded in late 2021 that the Tax Administration's blacklist had included people who had not committed fraud and that between 5,000 and 15,000 of them had possibly been wrongfully denied debt restructuring because of their listing. Vijlbrief subsequently told that he was looking into compensating victims.
COVID-19 pandemic