A citizen submitted a letter to the Institute of Accounting and Audit of Accounts (ICAC), attached to the Ministry of Economy and Enterprise, requesting access to a copy of the full text of the administrative sanctioning resolution, of February 26, 2016, issued by the ICAC, and of the proposed report on which the aforementioned administrative sanctioning resolution is based.
The Administration denied access on the grounds that the Audit of Accounts Act has a specific procedure for access to information and that the requested information is confidential because it is subject to professional secrecy, in accordance with article 14.1 (e) of Law 19/2013.
Submitted a claim, the Transparency and Good Government Council partially estimated it, taking as an example the precedent R/0298/2017, processed in this Transparency Council, which requested the full text of the administrative sanctions resolutions whose judgments have been published in the B.O.E in respect of Popular Banca Privada, SA (B.O.E of December 31, 2016) and Banco Popular Español, S.A (B.O.E of August 10, 2016) and the Judgment of the Central Court of the Contentious-Administrative Decision No.
It is particularly relevant, in addition to the correspondence between its contents, the prohibition of taking into account in the resolution other facts than those valued in the processing of the procedure. A connection that makes it impossible to consider the motion for a resolution to which access is requested as secondary or accessory information with respect to the final decision but rather on the contrary, we are dealing with relevant information in the processing of the file or in the formation of the public will of the body through the analysis and assessment of relevant aspects of this decision that have to be assessed.
This Transparency Council, however, shares that, if there is any type of information in the requested documents whose access may put at risk the economic and commercial interests of the audited entity or the industrial or intellectual property of the auditing company, it must be left out of public knowledge. This, however, does not make it possible to conceal all the documents, but rather to grant partial access after omission of the information affected by the invoked limit, in accordance with the provisions of Article 16 LTAIBG.
However, it is not sufficiently proven that the equality of the parties in judicial processes and effective judicial protection or the supervisory and control functions of ICAC may be prejudiced, so these limits should not be taken into consideration.
