'No individual error'

Court critical: Tax authorities withheld (again) information from a judge

By RTL News·April 19, 2024·Updated: April 19, 2024

RTL News

The tax authorities made a big mistake in a case that has been going on since 2015. The court ruled this week that an inspector “treated the truth very lightly”. But that's not the worst part: in the years that followed, information was withheld from the courts. And it is not the first time that this has happened.

The case where the Arnhem-Leeuwarden Court of Appeal this week verdict in deed, has been playing since 2015, when the tax authorities launched an investigation into an entrepreneur who sold his company in 2011 and allegedly lied about his place of residence. He left abroad and received an assessment from the tax authorities on his income of more than 21 million euros.

“Unlawful reason”

According to the Court, a lot of things went wrong during that investigation. This is how the case started because of an anonymous tip that appeared to come from an employee of the tax authorities. The tax authorities withheld that information. The tax inspector also dove into the tax authorities's systems without reason to find out how much of the entrepreneur's properties were worth. The entrepreneur found that there was no fair process and went to court. He ruled on the case in 2020, but appeared not to have received all the information from the tax authorities, according to the court.

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The court is now making mince of the attack that the tax authorities imposed on the entrepreneur. Indeed, according to the court, the investigation that the inspector started cannot serve as evidence “because the reason was unlawful”. The additional tax is off the table and the tax authorities must reimburse the court costs — up to 80,000 euros.

'Judges are done with it'

sooner discovered the political editors of RTL News although the tax authorities sometimes withhold information from court. This is contrary to the law, which requires that all relevant documents in a case must be submitted. “Judges are increasingly done with this,” tax lawyer Marco Bik said about this at the time. Later, there came more things to come to light.Secretary of State Van Rij for Finance said in a response that these are incidents and that the tax authorities always try to learn from them if things do go wrong. In a letter to Parliament, he emphasized once again “that there are no indications that there is a method where the tax authorities would regularly and wrongly withhold documents”.

The entrepreneur's lawyer, Mark Hendriks, tells RTL News that he finds the most shocking thing about the case that it wasn't one mistake by an individual official. “This involved numerous tax officials, from high to low in the organization. Very little of the cultural change promised by the Secretary of State seems to have come to fruition.”

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