Privacy watchdog destructive for government plan Tax Datamining: « Normality and proportionality insufficiently substantiated »
We now have to wait and see what Minister of Finance Jan Jambon does with the non-binding advice. – © Fred Debrock
The Data Protection Authority (GBA) mentions the plans of the De Wever government to apply data mining to the register with bank accounts a particularly far-reaching interference in privacy, for which the need is lacking. Thus De Tijd and L’Echo report Wednesday.
To increase the fight against tax fraud, the De Wever government wants to deploy strongly at the Central Contact Point (CAP) at the National Bank. That database already contains all balances of bank accounts and insurance contracts from Belgians. She can only be consulted by high officials at the tax authorities in the event of suspicions of fraud.
Read too. No, you should not fill everything in: this way you will go smoothly through your tax return
Through a program law, the government not only wants to expand that database further with, among other things, the balance of foreign accounts, individual securities accounts and crypto accounts.
Anonymous data analyzes
For example, a group of data miners, referred to by the Minister of Finance, could use the CAP for anonymous data analyzes. If that data mining indicates an increased risk in a file, an official could start an investigation.
« The scaffolders of the design fail to sufficiently substantiate the necessity and proportionality of this measure, » says the GBA in an advice
Suspicion of fraud
The GBA also points out that the guarantees for taxpayers are being eroded. They mean that there must first be a suspicion of fraud before access to the CAP is possible. Furthermore, the Privacy Committee criticizes the fact that data from the CAP will be copied to an anonymous database for the Dataminers at the FPS Finance.
We now have to wait and see what the government is doing with the non-binding advice. Finance Minister Jan Jambon (N-VA) was not available for comment on Tuesday.
