No dunning notice? No interest on overdue tax!

Tardy payment of tax assessments will prompt the Collector of Taxes to charge interest on overdue tax.

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands in a 2006 ruling determined it to be impermissible for the Tax and Customs Administration to charge interest on overdue tax where the tax payer in question through no fault of his or her own had not first received an official dunning notice. As the tax payer around whom the case revolved had successfully disproved the presumption of his having received the tax assessment whose deadline for payment he had missed, the Collector of Taxes should not have charged him interest on overdue tax, not least because it had been the Collector who had failed to render it plausible that the assessment had reached the tax payer or, alternatively, that the tax payer himself had been to blame for the tax assessment not having reached him. The Supreme Court affirmed that it was not the responsibility of the judiciary to investigate the facts the Collector of Taxes had presented, which facts moreover it had been up to the Collector himself to substantiate.

Dutch version: Geen invorderingsrente als aanmaning tot betaling niet is ontvangen