The Tax Authority has placed the management of the new VAT system entirely in the hands of the American company FAST Enterprises. With 1.5 billion euros per week in VAT revenue at stake, there are now serious concerns about digital sovereignty.
If that revenue of €1.5B a week disappears, the state will have to quickly borrow more on the international capital market. In theory, America could stop this process in the Netherlands thanks to a new tender, says Dutch tech commentator Bert Hubert.
Last year, FAST Enterprises won a €190 million tender for the renewal of VAT processing. However, the tender documents show that the American company is not only supplying software. FAST will also supply the servers, manage the software, and provide maintenance. And all of this will be done remotely, from the US. With BTW being the local term for VAT, Hubert calls the current situation “BTW-as-a-service” due to the lack of control.
Complete outsourcing
The “turnkey solution” as described in the tender includes equipment, system software, configuration, maintenance, and management. The new solution will also have access to 20 to 25 other applications within the Tax and Customs Administration. It is unclear exactly which ones these are; they could be purchased systems or locally developed applications (LOAs).
Given that the tender process has been ongoing for years, it is clear that the choice of an American IT supplier was made without knowledge of the current geopolitical tensions. Criticism has been coming from various quarters, logically including competitors for the tender, for some time now. However, the Tax and Customs Administration is said to have ensured that it runs independently within the Netherlands, although concrete evidence of the complete autonomy of the purchased system is not yet available.
The alternative would have been SAPTRM from SAP, implemented by Capgemini, which is well known to the tax authorities. A 2022 report by McKinsey compared this solution with that of FAST Enterprises, but it is now offline. In it, the latter solution, which was ultimately chosen, would have emerged as the winner.
According to the ICT Assessment Advisory Board, the preparations for this transition were insufficient in April 2024. The management was said to have been too weak, the need for the solution insufficiently clear, and above all, the preparation for the decision-making process was deemed ‘insufficiently careful’. In March 2025, the court ruled that the award to FAST was justified after Capgemini had filed a lawsuit.
Solvinity 2.0?
The acquisition of Solvinity by the American company Kyndryl sparked the controversy surrounding digital sovereignty at the beginning of this year. Because Solvinity manages the DigiD system for civil affairs on behalf of the government, dependence on the United States via the former IBM component Kyndryl would be risky. Exactly how much control Washington has is unclear, especially since the outsourcing of DigiD may eventually be relocated.
In short, what is now happening with FAST Enterprises seems to be repeating the controversy surrounding Solvinity. Although the details are completely different, the importance of the government’s digital autonomy remains at stake. The expressed concerns about decision-making and the lack of transparency about the exact control exercised by the Tax and Customs Administration make the issue highly debatable. This is clear even without the knowledge of 2026.