The High Court has set off the costs of four proceedings seeking tax information for foreign authorities, leaving no overall costs order between the applicant and a respondent company.
In a judgment delivered on 21 July 2020, Mr Justice Richard Humphreys dealt with costs after orders had been made requiring the company to disclose information sought by the Revenue Commissioners on behalf of authorities in France, Germany, the Republic of Korea and the Republic of Iceland. The disclosure orders had been made in an earlier judgment on 22 June 2020. The July judgment addressed costs, not the underlying disclosure requests.
The judge said the company had not complied with notices issued under section 902 of the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997. He accepted that the company had negotiated with Revenue and obtained a more restricted scope of disclosure. But he said this did not alter the principle that, because it had failed to comply with its legal obligations, the company was liable in principle for the costs of the subsequent section 902A proceedings.
The company had also objected to the information stated in the notices and relied on data protection obligations. The judge said it had not challenged the notices by judicial review and could not argue at this stage that they were legally flawed. He considered data protection restrictions irrelevant to the notices, given the statutory provision allowing service notwithstanding restrictions on disclosure.
On compliance costs, the judge followed the existing case law and allowed the company its costs of complying with the court’s disclosure orders. He said those costs should be limited to reasonable costs. Although he agreed that ideally the person required to comply with the law would bear such administrative costs, he said a specific statutory provision would be needed to change the existing approach.
The final order, made after further submissions on set-off, awarded the applicant the costs of the applications and the company the costs of compliance. The judge measured the two amounts as equal and set them off against each other, resulting in no overall order as to costs. He also made no order as to the costs of the costs application.