Government of the Netherlands must decide again about publishing the Tax Service source code

The Dutch government is not allowed to simply keep the source code of certain systems of the tax authorities secret. The outgoing Secretary of State must explain again why he does not want to reveal the source code, but with better substantiation. This is what the judge rules after a citizen's complaint.

The court in Gelderland judges that in an appeal that was started by a Dutchman. In 2023, he requested the source code of the systems with which the tax authorities regulate VAT. Among other things, he wanted code from the back end, CI and CD configurations, and configuration files. The Secretary of State refused to make those files public shortly afterwards and repeated that decision after the complainant appealed. Now, the complainant has enforced the government to decide this after all.

The Secretary of State cited various reasons for not having to make the source code public. For example, he found that “the importance of disclosure does not outweigh the financial and/or economic interest of the Tax Administration”, but also that disclosure could “endanger the levying and collection of sales taxes”. That would be because it is old code where things such as the names of servers, databases and tables are hardcoded in the software. The judge partly agrees that making it public may be dangerous, but the Secretary of State should better motivate that. Now, the Secretary of State is making the choice to keep the entire source code secret. “The Secretary of State must clarify which exception applies to which part of the VAT/OB source code,” says the judge. “It is up to the Secretary of State to take a new decision explaining which part of the requested information which exception applies to.” Click on the grey area and you will see the responses.

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