In its judgment of 29 May 2020 (ECLI:NL:HR:2020:973), the Supreme Court devoted an interesting consideration to how the tax court should assess the proportionality of administrative penalties. The Supreme Court ruled that if there is a dispute about whether or not to take an aggravating or diminishing factor into account, the court must give an opinion on this. The verdict on the facts may not be incomprehensible. However, the assessment of the various circumstances at issue does not need to be motivated. A second interesting aspect of this judgment is that, according to the Supreme Court, the (financial) gain not obtained (i.e. not prejudicing the Treasury) can be included as a penalty reducing factor in the determination of the amount of the fine.
The full blog post is written in Dutch.
Date: 12 February 2021
ECLI: ECLI:NL:HR:2020:973
Author: Christien Saris