A Trust and two Trustees c/o X Solicitors and Office of the Revenue Commissioners

The applicants’ FOI request of 19 March 2019 sought access to various records relating to the Trust from 1975 to date, including:

On 8 April 2020, the applicants applied to this Office for a review of Revenue’s decisions. Case Number OIC-68147-Z6R3F5 is concerned with the request of 19 March 2019 and Case Number OIC-68148-Z0Z9B1 is concerned with the request of 15 August 2019.

The scope of this review is confined to whether Revenue’s decisions on the requests is justified under the provisions of the FOI Act.

This Office’s Investigator invited Revenue to make submissions in relation to its searches for records covered by the request and on its reliance on the various provisions of the FOI Act referred to above. The Investigator noted that the withheld records 21-23 as listed in the RSO’s internal review decision contained a significant number of unscheduled documents i.e. record 21 (170 pages), record 22 (six folders totalling over 1,000 pages) and record 23 (192 pages).

Revenue now accepts that it misapplied section 37(1) to some parts of the records. It remains unclear to me whether or not Revenue relies on section 35(1)(b) of the FOI Act, as one part of Revenue’s submission to this Office states that it is relied on but later in the same submission, that it is not. Revenue’s basis for withholding records is therefore unclear.