Ro
En
Рy
The judges of the Constitutional Court partially accepted the notification from Dumitru Alaiba, the deputy from the Action and Solidarity Party, and concluded that the article of the Tax Code on tax secrecy was constitutional “insofar as the tax authorities and courts can verify the existence of a legitimate aim restricting access to information which represents a tax secret while examining cases on access to information, yet these contradicting principles need to be balanced.”
Besides, the CC mentioned that some information held by the State Tax Service could not be included in the category of tax secrets or excluded from the sphere of public interest. “Yet the conclusions largely depend on the factual and legal circumstances of each case; such conclusions may be drawn, on the one hand, by the responsible officials from the tax authorities who are requested to provide access to that information, and, on the other hand, by common law judges informed about the officials’ refusals to provide access to information,” the CC decision states.
Dumitru Alaiba filed a notification to the Constitutional Court in February this year, after the Tax Service refused to provide information on the amount of taxes paid by Alexandru Dodon, the brother of ex-President Igor Dodon, and by the companies he had founded or co-founded from 2017 to 2020. The Tax Service officials claimed such data could not be disclosed because it “was a tax secret.”
The current legal standard defines the concept of tax secrets as “any information available to the authorities in charge of tax administration, including the information on taxpayers which constitutes a trade secret, except for information on tax law violations.” Dumitru Alaiba claims that the notion of tax secrets “has no clear legal definition.” “The authorities often reply to the media representatives’ numerous legitimate requests regarding some state-owned enterprises’ activity and financial results, such as the taxes they pay to the state budget, in the manner: the information requested is ‘tax secret,’ according to the definition in the legislation. The access to the information of public interest is denied to civil society members and is justified by an abusive standard,” Alaiba wrote in his notification, requesting to declare the article unconstitutional.
It should be mentioned in this relation that, according to the data from an internal survey conducted by the Media Azi portal in May, trade secrets are often invoked as a reason for refusing to provide information requested by journalists.
