Benefits office unfairly uses heavy fines to trap insurance doctors: Unions, politicians

The benefits agency UWV must scrap the contract with which it keeps insurance doctors in training in its employment under the threat of massive fines, trade union NOVAG and parliamentarians Mariette Patijn (PRO) and Don Ceder (ChristenUnie) told EenVandaag. The MPs will ask Minister Hans Vijlbrief of Social Affairs and Employment to take action.

EenVandaag and AD recently discovered that insurance doctors in training sign a contract with the UWV stating that they will work at the government agency for their full term in training, plus two years. If they quit or drop out before that term, they face a fine of up to €70,000.

NOVAG, legal assistance provider and insurer VvAA, and sources within the UWV all confirmed to EenVandaag that several doctors in training who left before the contract ran out received a bill from the UWV. “This contract can be a factor causing people to feel unsafe and creating an unpleasant working atmosphere,” Mirko Bal of NOVAG told the program.

EenVandaag also spoke to several insurance doctors in training, who harshly criticized the UWV. To become an insurance doctor, you need to be a qualified house doctor and undergo four years of extra training. During the extra training, you work for four days a week and spend the fifth on your studies, in theory at least. In practice, they spend all their time trying to work away the UWV’s backlog in assessing people for the disability benefit WIA with little to no supervision.

“It is a stranglehold contract. Ultimately, I think a lot of people work here reluctantly. They sit out those 2 years after their training and then leave,” one insurance doctor, who is still working for the UWV, told the program.

Another, who quit and received a bill, told EenVandaag that she was so excited to become an insurance doctor that she did not even notice that she would be fined heavily for changing her mind. Once she started, her enthusiasm quickly disappeared because her supervisors mainly wanted her to handle as many files as quickly as possible. When she ultimately decided this job wasn’t for her, the UWV sent her a bill of €15,000 to repay part of her training fee. “[The contract] was also presented as just signing on the dotted line, because that is necessary to start. Knowing what I know now, I think I should have read it much more carefully.”

NOVAG understands that the UWV needs to bind employees to it for as long as possible due to its desperate shortage of insurance doctors, but there are better ways to do it. “I would say: be a good employer,” Bal said. “Create a safe and pleasant working environment. I don’t think you retain people at a workplace if you hang a fine of many tens of thousands of euros over their heads.”

Bal also thinks that, now that this clause in the contract is widely known, it will have the opposite effect and deter young doctors from pursuing insurance training at all.