It happens more often that the Tax and Customs Administration withholds information from the court, according to research by the political editors of RTL News earlier this year. This is against the law, which requires that all relevant documents in a case must be submitted.
Van Rij: these are incidents
State Secretary Van Rij of Finance said in a response that these are incidents and that the Tax and Customs Administration always tries to learn from them if things do go wrong. In a letter to the House of Representatives, he emphasized once again that ‘there are no indications that there is a working method in which the Tax and Customs Administration regularly and incorrectly withholds documents’.
See here how State Secretary Van Rij reacted earlier this year to the news that the Tax and Customs Administration sometimes withholds information from the court:
In a case involving an anonymous tipster, the Court in Arnhem concluded two weeks ago that e-mails that may be important for the assessment of the dispute were wrongly not submitted, even though the judges specifically requested this. Furthermore, the Court ruled that there are no good reasons to keep the identity of the informant secret.
The Court also says it has ‘serious reservations’ about whether the Tax and Customs Administration acted with integrity in its contact with the tipster. The office handling this case, FT Advocaten, calls it ‘worrying and frightening’ that the judges openly express their doubts about the integrity of the Tax and Customs Administration in this case. “That clashes with any form of due process.”
In a judgment of the District Court of Noord-Holland which was published last week, the Tax and Customs Administration also gets a good beating. In this case, the tax inspector himself admits during the hearing that not all relevant documents have been submitted, a course of action that the judge describes as ‘serious and extremely careless’. That is also reason to order the tax authorities to pay the full legal costs, something that does not happen often.
Ongoing investigation
The Taxes, Allowances and Customs Inspectorate already announced this after the publication of RTL News earlier this year to start an investigation to the information provided by the Tax and Customs Administration. That investigation is still ongoing. “These matters are of course relevant and we will see whether we include them in our investigation,” says the inspection service.
The Tax and Customs Administration says in a response: “Every time something goes wrong is one time too many. That should not happen and we naturally want to prevent that. As an organization, we are therefore constantly working on tax jurisprudence, and specifically also on the points of attention and information provision that inspectors have to deal with.”
2023-07-29 05:04:04
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