Tax authorities still transfer e-mail to American cloud service Microsoft

In March, the House of Representatives issued a motion calling for a halt to government ICT migrations to cloud services from American tech giants.

Now, the State Secretary has "decided, after a careful risk analysis and an extensive decision-making process, to proceed with the transition to M365," the letter states. This applies to email and online meetings, among other things, and not to things like tax returns.

Worrying, says privacy expert Bert Hubert, who sees two major risks with the switch. "First, you make yourself dependent on the Americans. If they don't like you, they can simply revoke your access to those cloud services."

This happened earlier this year to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Shortly after the court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the prosecutor's email account was blocked by Microsoft, at the behest of the US government.

Hubert: "As a government, you might start thinking: let's be a little nice to the US, otherwise we'll soon no longer be able to access our email. That will cost you independence points."

"The second aspect is that it's clear from all sides that the US government has access to our data," says Hubert. "The Tax and Customs Administration has a wealth of information on every Dutch citizen, including, for example, secret agreements with large multinationals. Now you're putting all of that within the reach of the Americans."

The Tax and Customs Administration's data is stored on European servers, but even these do not remain out of reach of the US government due to US law.

The State Secretary states that several alternatives were explored, but that they were not suitable. For example, according to Heijnen, there are no European services "that can offer a comparable level of functionality, security, and continuity as M365."

Hubert finds it strange, "because nine other ministries have found alternatives. For example, the Ministry of the Interior also uses Microsoft software, but they store their email and files on their own servers."

According to the letter to Parliament, such a so-called hybrid solution is "not feasible in the short and foreseeable future." And the State Secretary doesn't want to wait any longer, because employees are experiencing significant problems with the current software. The letter states that the transition would save them "15 to 30 minutes per day."

Experts say government agencies could benefit more from a "Dutch cloud." This video explains how it would work: