Tax office sometimes withholds documents in court cases

The Belastingdienst, the country’s tax office, sometimes withholds information from the court, breaking the law prescribing that all relevant documents must be submitted, RTL Nieuws reports based on its own research. Lawyers compared getting information from the tax office to pulling teeth, but according to Finance State Secretary Marnix van Rij, these are isolated incidents and not a structural problem.

According to the broadcaster, there are regular lawsuits about whether the Belastingdienst has included all relevant documents are included in the file. Judges sometimes reprimand the tax authority. In one case last year, the court ruled that the tax authority “seriously violated the good legal order” by withholding documents, for example. And in several other cases, judges scrapped additional taxes charged to citizens for the same reason.

“It is correct that in a number of situations, there is discussion about the documents relating to a case,” State Secretary Van Rij said to the broadcaster. “But it’s not like everything goes wrong. I really want to contradict the image that this is commonplace because it just isn’t. Any ruling is one too many, but we shouldn’t blow it up.”

“There are 23,000 appeal procedures. If it happened in all 23,000 appeals, we would have a very big problem. And that is not the case,” Van Rij said. “But again, I take very seriously what has been raised.”

But tax law professor Jan van de Streek disagrees. There are simply too many examples to write them off as isolated incidents, he said to the broadcaster. “It just happens too often,” Van de Streek said. “It is a matter of mentality. This lack of openness and transparency is in the DNA of the Belastingdienst.”

The Tax, Customs, and Allowances Inspectorate said it knew about a series of examples in which the Belastingdienst did not properly comply with the procedural laws, resulting in incomplete information submitted to the courts. “We have no insight into the reasons behind this, and it is unclear on what scale it occurs. But these kinds of signals are, of course, worrying.”

The Inspectorate has launched an investigation into the issue.