Eelco Eerenberg, now the Dutch State Secretary for Finance, photographed in Utrecht in June 2022, when he was a city alderman Credit: Bas van Setten \/ Gemeente Utrecht via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) The Dutch tax and customs administration has dropped its move to Microsoft 365 in the cloud. Its office software will instead run on servers it controls, together with European open source tools. State Secretary for Finance Eelco Eerenberg set out the plan in a letter to the Dutch parliament this week. The change covers the Belastingdienst, Dutch Customs and the Benefits Agency.<\/p>\n
Email and calendars will move to the agency\u2019s own servers in 2027. Open source tools for personal storage and collaboration will follow later in 2027 and in 2028. \u201cThis allows us to work in a focused way towards a sustainable and more autonomous solution for these functions,\u201d Eerenberg wrote, in TNW\u2019s translation from Dutch. How the plan changed The ministry told parliament in October 2025 that the agency would switch to Microsoft 365. At the time, it called the cloud suite the only workable and realistic option.<\/p>\n
In June, Eerenberg said the agency would review that choice. On 9 July, he paused the rollout. That pause followed a report from the Adviescollege ICT-toetsing, the government\u2019s ICT review board. Its main finding was that the agency\u2019s approach would not lead to a suitable workplace.<\/p>\n
By January 2026, about 5,000 of some 47,500 staff had moved to Microsoft 365, the board found. The board said the agency did not use Double Key Encryption, which would give it more control over its data. End-to-end encryption was not switched on by default for one-to-one Teams calls. It also found vendor lock-in and no workable exit strategy.<\/p>\n
That limited the agency\u2019s freedom to move to a more sovereign option later. What happens next The on-premises route is now possible partly because the agency has added data centre capacity, Eerenberg wrote. The agency will reuse existing licences where it can, to keep extra spending down. It follows the board\u2019s advice to look at alternatives for each function, rather than rely on one supplier.<\/p>\n
The switch delays some archive tools. Several features for records management were part of the Microsoft 365 package and do not exist on-premises. The agency is working out how to replace them, and Eerenberg will report back in his next progress letter. The same push for digital autonomy has already moved other projects.<\/p>\n
The agency took over hosting of its new VAT system from the supplier. As a result, the VAT refund system now goes live in April 2027. The domestic VAT rollout has moved from 1 July 2027 to the third quarter of 2027. Microsoft declined to comment to The Register.<\/p>\n
Eerenberg was due to discuss the plans with MPs in a committee debate on 7 October. Elsewhere in the Netherlands, the government is building its own Linux desktop. In July, Airbus said it would move its most critical apps to a French cloud. Brussels has also moved to put AWS and Azure under its toughest tech rules.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Eelco Eerenberg, now the Dutch State Secretary for Finance, photographed in Utrecht in June 2022, when he was a city alderman Credit: Bas van Setten \/ Gemeente Utrecht via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) The Dutch tax\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24890,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24889\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}