Court case 21/00910 – Court Ruling (Netherlands, 2022)

The controller (an inspector of the Tax Administration Arnhem) imposed an additional turnover tax assessment of €25,269 on the data subject. After objecting to this decision by the controller, the data subject brought the case before the Court of Gelderland, which partially upheld his claims. The data subject then appealed the Court’s decision. During the appeal, the controller submitted two overviews of the data subject's trading stock: one which contained personal data (such as registration numbers of the cars, tax numbers of buyers, names of buyers, etc.), and one where the personal data had been redacted. The controller invoked confidentiality as referred to in Article 8:29 Awb to protect the data of third parties, and only wanted the anonymized version to be used in his defense. He argued that the submission of the overview including the personal data was in violation of the data minimization principle. The data subject argued that the overview including the personal data had to be submitted, as the anonymised overview would be a disadvantage to his procedural position. First, the Court of Appeal considered that the overview contained personal data, and that its submission to the Court had to be understood as ‘processing’ within the meaning of Article 4(2)(c) GDPR. It further noted that the controller had a legal obligation to provide the Court with documents ‘relating to the case’ pursuant to Article 8:42 Awb. The Court found that the overview did relate to the case, and held that the submission of the overview including personal data was not in violation of the data minimization principle (Article 5(1)(c) GDPR), since the processing was based on a legal obligation pursuant to Article 6(1)(c) GDPR.