The use of Automated Decision Making (ADM) systems in the public sector will become increasingly prevalent in the future, making citizens increasingly likely to be confronted with decisions that have been made fully automatically, without human intervention. Ever more digitization increases the opaqueness of the social benefits system in the Netherlands and leads to citizens facing most of the adverse, sometimes unforeseen effects of automation. Why and how unsafeness and unexpected effects emerge is not well known. In this research, these effects, defined to be ripple effects, are explored using a system safety lens and proposing an agent-based model design to explore why and how the effects emerge.

The leading cause of ripple effects was found to be the lack of a hierarchical safety structure, seen in laws being organized per organization, and the lack of an overarching controller to ensure that overlap does not occur.
This is partly due to a lack of an accurate model representing a Dutch citizen. Several policy recommendations are presented, including a rudimentary set-up on how to apply a safety control structure within the social benefits system.