Now that the Lower House of the Dutch Parliament has adopted the Tax and Customs Administration (Electronic Messaging) Bill, this has paved the way for exclusively digital communication between the tax authorities and the tax payers.
The current situation is one, inter alia, in which decisions concerning benefits are dispatched both electronically and in writing. The legislative amendment is about to change this, in that decisions of this kind made from late 2015 onwards will only be dispatched digitally.
This is what you should do to get your digital mailbox up and running.
Any tax payer aged 14 or over had a digital mailbox with the authorities. This mailbox can be identified by logging on to www.mijnoverheid.nl, where the tax payer using his or her personal DigiD can access his or her own mailbox. All decisions concerning benefits (and, in time, any other communications from the Tax and Customs Administration) will be deposited in the tax payer’s mailbox. The web site offers you the option of including your e-mail address to ensure that you should receive an e-mail message whenever a communication has been freshly deposited in your mailbox. As you will doubtless appreciate, you should check your own mailbox at regular intervals and tweak your settings where appropriate, as you will no longer be receiving information by post on the topic of the tax authorities’ decisions concerning your benefits for 2016.