Commissioner for Information of Public Importance and Personal Data Protection, Rodoljub Sabic has sent to the Ministry of Finance - Tax Administration a Warning in which he shows that the Tax Administration in the implementation of the Law on Free Access to Information of Public Importance is for a longer time now continuously breaking not just the provisions of this Law, but also provisions of the Law on Data Secrecy and the Personal Data Protection Act.
Stressing that the Tax Administration is almost regularly denying information to the media, journalists, citizens and to all other seekers, that is, it discloses them just after the order of the Commissioner, and sometimes not even then, the Commissioner, Rodoljub Sabic has also stated the following:
„By acting upon requests for accessing information, the Tax Administration is persistently rejecting them, solely referrring to Article 7 of the Law on Tax Procedure and Tax Administration, where all data from the tax procedure represent an „official secret".
Such an attitude is doubly wrong.
First, because the Law on Free Access to Information, speaking about the possibility to refuse information protected by some of the security marks, besides the formal condition requires the existence of essential, material condition, that there are facts showing that disclosure of information would really result in harmful legal or other consequences for interests predominant to the right of the public to know. Determining those circumstances is the obligation of the authorities in power. Without that, mere existence of the formal secrecy mark is not enough for refusing exercise of that right.
The other thing is that, already from strictly formal standpoint, acting of the Tax Administration is completely opposed to the provisions of the Data Secrecy Act regulating the unique system of determining and protecting secret data. Simply, because according to that data the „official secret" does not exist at all in the secret data classification system. According to Article 108 of the Secret Data Act, provisions of the existing laws in the part pertaining to secret data could be applied the latest until January 1st 2010, and the deadline in which the managers of the authority in power (so, of the Ministry of Finances and Tax Administration) were obliged to reassess all the existing secrecy marks has lapsed on December 24, 2011.
It is especially worrying that in the meantime the Tax Procedure and Tax Administration Act has been changed two times, and the opportunity has been omitted to perform the obligation of its harmonization with the new standards. Even more so, its last amendments (December 2011) were the base for new practice, which is completely disputable from the standpoint of Personal Data Protection Act. This primarily pertains to public publishing on the Tax Administration's website, of the physical persons, who are taxpayers, personal data,. For such personal data processing, although the Tax Administration claims differently, the legal base obviously hasn't been made by the performed amendments."
