Samenvatting

Over the years, the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration (DTCA) has been criticized. This criticism escalated in the child benefits scandal. Moreover, it has become visible that the DTCA is dealing with an institutional crisis. Institutional crises seem to appear out of nowhere. However, in this article I show that public organizations can foresee institutional crises. I develop an identification and reflection framework which identifies the first seeds of an institutional crisis. New in this framework is the focus on the internal dynamics of the institutional structure of public organizations. The two dimensions, the foundation, and the operational practice, must be in line with each other. A discrepancy between the two dimensions either leads to a sag or an overburdened public organization. With help of the framework, I explore how the DTCA could have foreseen the institutional crisis.