Spain bans Catalonia’s Tax Agency from hiring civil servants from other administrations

The appeal made by the Spanish government to stop the reform of Catalonia’s Tax Agency has finally been accepted by the Spanish Constitutional Court (TC). In particular, the TC declared ‘invalid and unconstitutional’ article 4 of Law 9/2015, which stipulated that all those civil servants who want to be eligible for a position in the body would need to have permanent positions in Catalonia. According to the article, those ‘officials who are assigned duties substantially matching those of the body and who already hold permanent positions within Catalonia’s borders’would be eligible to voluntarily join the Catalan Tax Agency through specific selection processes. The problem, according to the Spanish government, lay in the fact that a permanent position in Catalonia is required and this denies ‘the right of equal access to other interested bodies from the rest of Spain’.

The TC considered that article 4 to be unconstitutional because ‘the autonomic legislator isn’t acting within his competences if he regulates the access to the public function through a participation process which is not open nor subject to conditions of equality’. According to the magistrates, the suspended article aimed to set up a ‘restricted’system to access the public function and therefore contradicted ‘the open character’established for selection processes. ‘All together this leads us to conclude that the suspended regulations violated the State’s competences regarding the statutory regime of the public servants’.

Article 4 considered ‘unconstitutional’

Article 4 of Law 9/2015 to expand Catalonia’s Tax Agency stipulated that those ‘officials who are assigned duties substantially matching those of the body and who already hold permanent positions within Catalonia’s borders’would be eligible to voluntarily join the Catalan Tax Agency through specific selection processes.

The problem, according to the Spanish government, lay in the fact that a permanent position in Catalonia is required and this denies ‘the right of equal access to other interested bodies from the rest of Spain’.

The Spanish Executive also pointed out that allowing civil servants who weren’t previously working in the Catalan administration to do so, is against Article 103 of the Constitution, as it a way of accessing ‘ex novo’this civil service function rather than allowing so ‘according to principles of merit and ability’.