On Wednesday 20 December, the Brussels Court of Appeal overturned the decision by Belgium’s Data Protection Authority (DPA) to prohibit the transfer of tax data to the United States.
In June, the Belgian tax authorities appealed against the DPA’s decision to prohibit the transfer of the personal data of Belgian ‘accidental Americans’ by the Federal Public Service Finance (SPF) to the US tax authorities, as provided for in the FATCA intergovernmental agreement (see EUROPE 13207/27). The DPA considered that the data processing did not comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The Brussels Court of Appeal dismissed the case on the grounds that the DPA Litigation Chamber had not given sufficient reasons for not following the report of the DPA inspectorate, which had concluded that the data transfers were legal.
“The DPA’s conclusions on the merits remain highly relevant and I believe it's high time that the EU Member States start renegotiating the FATCA agreements in order to exclude accidental Americans from their scope and to include sufficient guarantees in terms of data protection”, commented Fabien Lehagre, President of the Association of Accidental Americans (AAA), in a statement. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)