Decision of the Lyon Administrative Court of Appeal regarding Article L.76 B of the Public Finance Act and freely accessible documents
Last Thursday, the Lyon Administrative Court of Appeal issued a ruling concerning Article L.76 B of the General Tax Code and the disclosure of publicly available documents when the taxpayer is unable to access them.
The Court notes that the Council of State has established the following principle: "With regard to documents or copies of documents containing information gathered from websites or data servers and used byadministration assess a tax adjustment, it is incumbent upon the administration to make them available to the taxpayer prior to the collection of the resulting taxes if the taxpayer informs the administration, prior to such collection and in response to a refusal to disclose based on the freely accessible nature of the information in question, that he was unable to access it.”
In this case, the taxpayer had stated—on the grounds that the proposal did not meet the requirement to provide a rationale set forth in Article L.57 of the LPF—that he was unable to access a website mentioned in the reassessment proposal formed the basis for the increase.
The Court finds that, under these circumstances, the taxpayer cannot be deemed, for the purposes of the requirement set forth in Article L.76 B of the LPF, to have informedadministration have access to documents freely available on that website, and finds thatadministration indeed comply with the requirements of Article L.76 B of the LPF.