Arnhem-Leeuwarden Court of Appeal Rules Tax Authorities’ Investigation Illegal: Entrepreneur Cleared of 21 Million Euro Income Claims

The case before the Arnhem-Leeuwarden Court of Appeal this week he reported, has been playing since 2015. Then the Tax Authorities began to investigate an entrepreneur who sold his company in 2011 and allegedly lied about his residence. He went abroad and received an assessment from the tax authorities of his income of more than 21 million euros.

‘Unlawful purpose’

According to the Court, everything went wrong during that investigation. The case started with an anonymous tip that resulted from an employee of the Tax Authorities. The tax authorities withheld that information. The tax inspector also entered the Tax Authorities’ systems without any reason to find out the value of the entrepreneur’s property.

The entrepreneur felt that there was no fair trial and went to court. He was managing the case in 2020, but it turned out that he had not received all the information from the Tax Authorities, ruled the court.

The court is now analyzing the assessment made by the Tax Authorities on the entrepreneur. According to the court, the investigation started by the inspector cannot be evidence ‘because the reason was illegal’. The additional assessment is canceled and the Tax Authorities must pay back the legal costs – up to 80,000 euros.

‘Judges are made of him’

earlier found the political editors of RTL Nieuws although the tax authorities sometimes withhold information from the judge. This is against the law, which requires that all relevant documents in a case must be submitted. “Judges are getting fed up with this,” tax lawyer Marco Bik said at the time. more things will come to light.

Secretary of State Van Rij of Finance said in response that these are events and that Tax Authorities always try to learn from them when things go wrong. In a letter to Parliament, he emphasized again that ‘there are no indications that there is a working method where Tax Authorities regularly and wrongly withhold documents’.

See here how Secretary of State Van Rij responded last year to the news that the Tax Authorities sometimes withhold information from the judge:

The entrepreneur’s lawyer, Mark Hendriks, tells RTL News that the most surprising thing about the case is that it was not a single mistake by an individual civil servant. “There were several tax officials involved in this, from high to low in the organization. It seems that very little has come of the cultural change promised by the Secretary of State.”