The Bibob investigation you carry out yourself
Article 7a of the Wet Bibob, the Dutch public-administration integrity screening act, gives you the authority to carry out your own investigation. Noctua is the environment in which you do that and in which you record what you have done.
Article 7a own investigation
Preliminary stage, not a replacement for the Landelijk Bureau
Questionnaire with deadline monitoring
Policy rule as red flag
Before, during and after a request for advice
A request for advice to the Landelijk Bureau Bibob, the national Bibob screening agency, only becomes an option once you have carried out your own investigation and found sufficient indications. Even when the tip comes from another administrative authority, you must still carry out that investigation yourself.
Noctua does not take the place of the Landelijk Bureau. It supports your own investigation, and that continues after you have requested advice.
Before you submit a request, work out what you can establish yourself. If you do not request advice, the record shows what that choice was based on. If you receive advice, you have your own case file to weigh against it. Your vergewisplicht (the duty to satisfy oneself that an advice is sound) under article 3:9 of the Awb (the Dutch General Administrative Law Act) requires exactly that. If you depart from the advice, article 3:50 applies.
For a permit, a subsidy, a public tender or a real-estate transaction, the policy you apply differs. The case file is built up in the same way.
Your policy rule becomes the red flag
The policy rule of your administrative authority determines which sectors and grounds lead to further investigation. We set those rules up together with you, so that a case file is flagged where your own policy says it should be.
The questionnaire and the deadline
If you send the Bibob questionnaire through Noctua, the platform tracks what happens to it: whether it has been opened, whether the link is still valid, and when it comes back. For as long as it is open, the decision period is paused, and the platform reports when it expires or is about to expire.
Which questions the party concerned is shown depends on what they have filled in before. They are not presented with questions or document requests that do not apply to their situation, and what does apply they cannot skip. The answers go straight into the case file, verified by SMS and digitally signed, with the documents sent along filed with the question they were submitted to support.
What the platform does not do is assess those documents for you. It produces no judgement on the content of a document and no notice that a document deviates. What comes in and what is missing is visible; what that means you establish yourself. If your working method contains a check that can be written out in fixed rules, we look together at whether a flag can be made of it. Even then that flag remains a reason to look, and not the judgement.
That matters because an incomplete form has consequences. An application may be declared inadmissible under article 4:5 of the Awb, and for a decision that has already been granted, article 4 of the Wet Bibob treats a refusal to cooperate as a serious risk. What comes in, and what is missing, are therefore themselves part of your grounds.
If your organisation uses its own system for the forms, that can stay in place. Deadline monitoring will not work in that case, because it relies on the platform itself knowing when the form was sent and what happened to it.
Alongside what the party concerned states
The form provides what the party concerned states about control, financing and the people involved in the business. What you establish alongside it goes into the same case file, so that the declaration and the register sit side by side.
Noctua maps the structure around the business. Directors, shareholders, affiliated companies and the addresses they hang from, and from any point you step through to what is attached to it. The timeline puts events in order, so it becomes visible when a registration changed and which roles overlapped.
Financial data comes in through a data provider we have an agreement with. Creditworthiness, payment behaviour and the filed annual accounts.
Not all of that data has the same moment. What comes from the trade register is current at the moment of querying, while figures from annual accounts relate to the financial year they were filed for. Every item shows when it was retrieved.
You can open two views at the same time: the submitted document beside the network, or the timeline beside the structure. In one screen you then see whether what was declared matches what is registered.
When the structure crosses the border
The Bibob questionnaire requires the party concerned to supply extracts from foreign trade registers for directors, shareholders and those holding control who are themselves foreign legal entities. The Bibob register has a field for it: for such an entity you enter the registration number as recorded in that country's trade register. Foreign legal entities are therefore provided for in Bibob practice, which means you must be able to place them in your case file as well.
In Noctua those legal entities appear in the network like the rest, connected to the parties they hang from. Which foreign trade registers you can query follows from what has been set up for your organisation. What the party concerned supplies you place beside what you find yourself.
The origin of every piece of data
For every item of data you can establish where it came from, when it was retrieved and by whom. The log also records who has viewed a case file, and it cannot be switched off.
That weighs more heavily here than elsewhere. If your decision is challenged, article 7:4 Awb requires you to make all documents relating to the case available for inspection, and on appeal they go to the court under article 8:42. That obligation reaches further than what you used in support, while article 28 Wet Bibob determines at the same time who may and may not see them.
Confidentiality
The data in a Bibob investigation is subject to the duty of confidentiality in article 28 Wet Bibob. It is broad: on 25 January 2023 the Administrative Jurisdiction Division of the Raad van State (Netherlands) held that it reaches further than the advice of the Landelijk Bureau and also covers what the party concerned supplied itself. Your own findings fall under it along the same line, because the act speaks in general terms of data relating to a third party. Breach is a criminal offence, and there have by now been convictions.
In Noctua, therefore, what someone may view, edit and close follows from their role. Case files of one team are not visible to another unless you explicitly set that up, and an investigator can work on a case file before it is shared within the organisation. If an entity appears that has been investigated before, you see that and in which case file, but whether you can open that case file depends on your rights.
Within and outside the chain of control
Not every flag sits on the applicant itself. Article 3(4)(c) Wet Bibob provides that the party concerned also stands in relation to criminal offences where another person committed them and that person directs, has control over, provides capital to, or stands in a business relationship with the party concerned. The act names those relations in the past tense as well: whoever directed or stood in such a relationship counts just as much.
You must be able to substantiate that relationship yourself. For a business relationship the Raad van State requires a commercial relationship aimed at cooperation that has a certain lasting and structural character. Lasting is a finding about time, and for that you must be able to show when the relationship existed and for how long.
Noctua shows which flags sit on the subject and which fall outside it, with the connection through which they hang from the investigation. The timeline puts the periods in order, including those of roles that have since ended. What that connection is worth, you determine.
The report
You assess each flag yourself: relevant or not relevant. The report grows with the investigation, so what you record as relevant and what you base it on goes into it straight away. What you set aside stays visible in the case file, and you can come back to it later.
You can only close once everything has been weighed: if anything is still open, the platform blocks completion. Checks that produced nothing are in the case file as well, with the moment at which they were run.
The number of red flags in a case file is a work queue. It counts how many points are still to be weighed and runs down to zero as you work through the case file. About the applicant, the number says nothing.
We configure the template for your organisation. If you proceed to the Landelijk Bureau, we can set it up so that the case file contains the grounds needed for the request for advice.
What the demo shows
We work through an investigation up to and including the report, so you can see how a policy rule plays out in the platform.
The finding is yours
A marking is an indication that there is something to look at. Whether a degree of danger as meant in article 3 Wet Bibob follows from it is a finding of your administrative authority. The platform does not touch that: there is no score and no conclusion.
That matches where the act places that finding. Article 3:2 Awb requires you to gather the necessary knowledge of the relevant facts, and article 3:46 that your decision rests on sound reasoning. What you establish, and on what basis, is therefore what counts.
After the decision
A permit continues to run, and the facts on which you granted it can change. If you later want to revoke or reassess, the same requirement applies as for the first decision: it rests on facts you have established and can substantiate.
You decide for yourself which entities from the investigation you keep following and what you want to be alerted to. Such a notification arrives in the case file in which the entity was investigated, with the source and the moment alongside it, so that what you established at the time still sits beside it. If you delete the case file, the monitoring stops.
A Bibob investigation from start to finish
We work through a Bibob investigation in the platform, including the audit log that builds up behind it.